Computer whiz starts a new phone service with Internet links

You've heard the stories about computer-savvy teenagers, barely old enough to vote, who are nonetheless reshaping the technology industry -- and our entire economy. <br><br>Angus Davis, who grew up

Monday, April 17th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

You've heard the stories about computer-savvy teenagers, barely old enough to vote, who are nonetheless reshaping the technology industry -- and our entire economy.

Angus Davis, who grew up in Providence, is living that story.

He skipped college and left Rhode Island at age 18 for a chance to work at Netscape Communications Corp., where he rose to product manager of the company's widely used Web browser. Forbes Magazine recently called him "one of the Valley's hottest young engineers."

Now, at the ripe old age of 22, Davis is at the top of a new company he co-founded, TellMe Networks.

TellMe is perhaps the most promising of a new breed of free services that let you get everyday information -- including stock quotes, movie listings, restaurant phone numbers or the local weather forecast -- over the telephone.

TellMe began a limited public test of its service last week. (Get on a waiting list by signing up at www.tellme.com.)

While telephone-based information services have existed for years, TellMe and its competitors are different because they can recognize human speech.

There's no need to press buttons on the phone's keypad. Instead, you navigate the service with simple spoken commands, such as "stocks," "restaurants," or "weather."

Davis and colleague Mike McCue left Netscape early last year in order to start TellMe.

"We had some very vague concept," Davis said in a telephone interview from Mountain View, Calif., where TellMe is based. "We knew we wanted to combine the power of the Internet with the convenience of the telephone."

The TellMe service uses the Internet for some of its content, and is built around the same kind of technologies used to make Web pages.

But the Internet is well hidden from callers.

The service is accessed by calling a toll-free number. A greeting asks which category you want: stock quotes, restaurants, movies, weather, news sports, traffic, airlines, horoscopes, soap operas and the lottery.

Say "news" for example, and the services gives you more categories: business, technology and top stories.

Say "business" and you hear a stock market report prepared by The Wall Street Journal that sounds like one you would hear on the radio.

Back at the starting menu, you can say "movies," and then the name of a movie you want to see. The service will tell you where the movie is playing and the show times.

The restaurant feature will look up the phone number of a restaurant you say. It will even connect you to the restaurant for free.

The "phone booth" feature lets you make free two-minute calls anywhere in the U.S. The tradeoff is you have to listen to an advertisement beforehand.

There is even a Black Jack feature that lets you play the card game against a foreign-sounding dealer, who offers comments like "you kick booty" when you win.

TellMe sometimes responds in carefully pieced together clips of human voices, which can sound as though someone is talking. Other times, it uses a computer-generated, but understandable voice to provide restaurant addresses or other information.

I was warned by Marci Gottlieb, TellMe's public relations director, that the service was not completed and was not entirely working properly. I found that to be true one day last week, when looking for a restaurant. After telling it to search for restaurants in Providence, a computer-generated voice piped up with a bizzare message: "An error of type unable-to-find-file occurred while attempting to process file."

But for the most part, the service worked, and its voice recognition accuracy was impressive. I even tried faking some accents to fool it while requesting stock quotes, and the it still chose the right company nearly every time.

TellMe is gradually allowing more people to use the service, until it opens it up entirely in June.

Davis said the company hopes to make money by selling ad time on the service, and by letting companies set up shop on the TellMe service. For example, TellMe might sign up an online music seller, and help that company connect its Web site to the TellMe phone service. TellMe callers might be able to say the name of the group they like, hear some song samples, and buy the recording that has those songs.

The company's plans have impressed its private investors. In two rounds of financing, the company raised $53 million. And the money came from some of the biggest names in the technology world.

Davis and McCue have managed to assemble an impressive staff stocked with talent, which now numbers about 115. They came from real companies, including America Online, AltaVista, AT&T, Web TV and Excite@Home. Some of techno-wizards at TellMe were former rivals -- working at Microsoft and Netscape -- on competing browsers.

At TellMe, pizza parties and video games seem to be part of the company culture. But there is lots of work.

Davis said he often puts in 20-hour days during the week, and spends a night or two each week sleeping on a homemade bunk bed that rises above his desk.

What's exiting, he said, was that he's helped create something entirely new, and make it useful to everyone -- not just to those who have computers.

"My 82-year-old grandmother uses the service," he said.

"I can't tell you how frustrating it is when everything you are building is only relevant to some small subset of the population."

Davis seems to have endless enthusiasm, and he tends to gush when he talks about how things are going.

"It's great," he said. "The most exciting thing is I get to go into work and share an office and share a vision and share an entire company with the group of people I'm working with. They're the most wonderful people I've known in my life."

Timothy C. Barmann covers technology for The Providence Journal. His column runs every other week on the More For Your Money page. Send him comments via e-mail at tim@cybertalk.com or U.S. mail, c/o The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.