Mobile virtual assistants have not completely gone away. They just look different.

Remember the mobile virtual personal assistants of yesteryear – like Wildfire and General Magic’s Portico? Wildfire featured a friendly woman’s voice designed to help busy mobile professionals complete tasks using voice commands. Her personality was even crafted to be that of someone you’d really want to talk with.

General Magic went out of business in 2002. Orange pulled the plug on Wildfire in 2005. Still, that doesn’t mean voice-activated assistants went away, or that using voice commands to retrieve information was a bad idea. Products and services along the same lines have been rolled into larger offerings. At the same time, voice-recognition technology has improved by leaps and bounds.

MULTIMAIL ACCESS

Today, the buzzwords are unified communications (UC), which is just another face of those old personal assistants. Making enterprises and their employees work more efficiently is one of the promises of UC, and Microsoft’s worldwide Unified Communications Launch 2007, to be held in San Francisco starting Oct. 16, is destined to generate even more buzz.

A NEW ASSISTANT
While a lot of people are talking about unified communications, Excendia President and CEO Bachir Halimi says his company offers a “unified communications – plus” product. The offer: enabling mobile professionals to handle their messaging and phone calls from any phone using speech commands. The Excendia virtual assistant, or EVA, offers a hands-free and eyes-free method of handling messages.

Artilium’s UC Enabler allows calls to be placed to any phone or mobile device via most Microsoft desktop applications.

The Montreal-based company does not currently work directly with a North American wireless carrier but wants to raise awareness among carriers to offer the solution to end-users. The product is built in a granular fashion, so users check boxes for what they want, from just having e-mail read to them to scheduling appointments by phone. Pricing will be up to operators, but Excendia suggests $9.95 for a basic plan or $29.95 for a full-blown assistant. They envision business professionals, from financial advisers to lawyers and accountants, will want to use the service.

It’s not just any old virtual assistant, either. Excendia is talking about offering things that a live associate would do on a daily basis, except its assistant works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The assistant can access a person’s Outlook account and read e-mails, appointments, tasks and contacts over the phone. If you call into the assistant, you can hear what’s on your agenda and schedule new appointments.

Excendia executives also say the system is useful for people with disabilities. Blind people can now enjoy the world of e-mail by listening to messages and replying verbally, says Gabor Barta, vice president of sales and business development at Excendia. And the system addresses concerns about hands-free driving while still allowing professionals to get tasks done while commuting.

BETTER TECHNOLOGIES
What makes Excendia believe they will succeed where others failed? Excendia spent more than three years on research and development, and in the years since the days of Wildfire, technologies have evolved considerably. Speech recognition today can understand natural language. Memory is cheaper, and processing power is greater.

The services from the 1990s and early 2000s were before their time, Halimi says. “The reality is that speech is the most natural communication language for human beings,” he says. Yet people are forced to use keyboards and translate thoughts in written form.

Of course, speech solutions don’t always lend themselves to meetings in conference rooms and riding in elevators. That’s where mobile e-mail comes in – and in a big way. Research In Motion (RIM) recently announced its Unite PC-based software for small groups, such as a family or small office, to stay connected. The software provides groups of up to five users with mobile access to shared calendars, pictures, documents and other desktop content through their BlackBerry.

You can still find the voice-based virtual assistant in many forms, says Marty Parker, principal at UniComm Consulting. “This speech-enabled mobility is still a viable solution to the point it has been built into the mainstream products,” he says. “Speech as a mobility tool is more prevalent than it seems,” buried inside core products. “It’s just become part of the solution.”

Businesses face two main issues when it comes to mobile employees, he says. One is seamless communications so that all workers see the same inbox, receive the same presence indicators and possibly have access to other back-office tools. The second issue relates to the mobile worker’s specific job, and solutions exist today- for example, for Fed Ex or UPS drivers - to obtain the recipients’ signatures on handheld devices. Of course, many companies offer ways to deliver information to the mobile device.

PLENTY OF COMPETITION
In some ways, pieces of Excendia’s technology may compete with Microsoft or Google, which acquired Grand Central, a company that developed a UC service to integrate all existing phone numbers and voice mail boxes into one. Plenty of find-me/follow-me services are out there, but Excendia executives say not all the pieces are necessarily in one place, the way it offers. “Nobody has really brought them all together,” Barta says.

Parker agrees that opportunities exist for a company like Excendia in offering solutions for enterprises that can’t afford the upgrades put out by bigger-name players. “This is a huge market,” he says. Among Excendia’s partners are IBM and Microsoft. Earlier this year, Excendia announced the availability of EVA on IBM WebSphere Voice Server.

One of the key elements is making it personal and personalizing the relationship between the user and the service or application. Excendia’s virtual assistant keeps information about a user’s preferences – whether he or she likes to be called at certain hours, for example. If the user wants to listen to e-mail first, the system adapts to that.

UC: A Crowded Field

In Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications 2007, among the players listed are Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Siemens, NEC, Interactive Intelligence, Mitel, Oracle, Interwise, Ericsson, TeleWare, AVST and Adomo. Gartner defines UC products as “those that enhance individual, workgroup and organizational productivity by enabling and facilitating the control, management, integration and use of multiple enterprise communication methods.” UC products may be made up of a stand-alone product suite or a portfolio of integrated applications and platforms, according to Garner.

Artilium doesn’t call its offering a mobile virtual assistant, but its UC solution offers the ability for customers to get all their e-mail, voice mail and SMS/MMS in one place, forwarded to them wherever they’re located or sent to someone else. Artilium’s intelligent system will route calls based on certain parameters. Most of its customers thus far are based in Europe; the company has headquarters in London and offices in Seattle and Belgium.

Artilium, whose partners also include IBM and Microsoft, is not targeting the large businesses that the likes of Cisco, Nortel Networks or Avaya are going after. “We feel there’s this huge opportunity for small and medium businesses,” says Gytis Barzdukas, vice president of marketing at Artilium.

“We feel there’s this huge opportunity for small and medium businesses,” says Gytis Barzdukas, vice president of marketing at Artilium.

He says it’s all about addressing people’s frustration with trying to manage multiple inboxes, mobile and desk phones. People want a mechanism to help effectively manage all their communications, with anytime, anywhere access to the stuff that’s important to them.

Whether you call it a virtual assistant, unified communications or unified communications on steroids, it all boils down to making mobile professionals more productive.