User:DulcetTone/Wildfire Communications, Inc.

Wildfire Communications, Inc. was an American company founded in 1992 that developed and sold software and equipment to enhance telephone communications. It announced a speech-based electronic secretary in October 1994.

Founding
Wildfire Communications was founded in 1992 by inventor Bill Warner, Vice President of Marketing Nick d'Arbeloff, Director of Engineering Rich Miner and chief designer Tony Lovell. Two rounds of venture capital funding in 1992 and 1993 allowed the company to progress from ideas to development to the announcement of its first product – a virtual assistant named "Wildfire", in October 1994.

The Wildfire Assistant
Wildfire had an anthropomorphic voice user interface to let users speak commands over a telephone connection to route calls, handle messages and perform related tasks. A playful, natural style of the recorded voice prompts encouraged users to think of Wildfire as a real person despite their knowledge that this was not actually true, a mindset reflected by writers and users commonly speaking of Wildfire as "she". This personification helped foster a quicker understanding of the role Wildfire performed: that of an executive assistant tasked with assisting mobile workers. Though users could also use touchtones to control Wildfire, the system's recorded voice prompts elicited them to speak their commands, reinforcing the interactive model of co-workers on a business call.

A Wildfire account owner (or "boss") would, in practice, only ever dial a single phone number in future – the same number he would offer to contacts wishing to reach him: his "Wildfire number". Wildfire would answer these calls, saying, "Hello. You've reached the office of (user name spoken here).  Please say your full name." An outside caller would identify him or herself by name at this point and receive simple options to have Wildfire either route the call to the boss or to take a message; whereas the boss calling to log in to his account would say, "It's me, Wildfire" and intone a numeric passcode for authentication.

Outside Caller Interface
Upon hearing an outside caller's name, Wildfire would see whether she recognized it as one of the boss's contacts before asking if the caller wanted her to "Take a message" or "Put my call through". The logic underlying this dialog might be modified based on whether the boss had indicated to Wildfire that he was "unavailable" or "taking important calls". In all cases, when asked to "put my call through", Wildfire would place the caller on hold and attempt to locate the boss and announce the call.

"Boss" Interface
After the account owner entered his passcode, Wildfire would summarize new messages or reminders that had come due or simply say "What can I do for you?", at which point, a "session" would be started in which the user could speak successive commands (there were over thirty commands) and Wildfire would respond. The effect was very much like a dialog between a roving employee and a co-worker helping him, back at the office.

Some commands required no elaboration and produced an immediate response from Wildfire, permitting the user to follow by speaking another command, for instance:

Wildfire: You have three new messages. The first is from (Alex Sharpe). User: Next Item Wildfire: New message from (Erica Little). User: Describe it Wildfire: This message arrived two hours ago. She left a callback number: 617 555 1212 User: Give them a call Wildfire: Dialing...

Other commands, such as the "Call" command, might require additional information before completion — sometimes as a consequence of the modest speech recognition available at the time — and so initiated an interactive dialog before the next command could be spoken:

Wildfire: What can I do for you? User: Call... Wildfire: Call who? User: Erica Little Wildfire: (Erica Little). At which place? User: Work Wildfire: Dialing...

"Background mode" was an essential and patented attribute of the Wildfire session. When a user placed a phone call through Wildfire, or told her "That will be all for now", Wildfire said, "Say 'Wildfire' when you need me..." and stepped into background mode. When in background mode, Wildfire would silently ignore any speech other than this single "Wildfire" keyword, which would prompt her to joyfully declare "Here I am!" as she came back to the foreground where all the commands would be recognized. Background mode thus allowed a Wildfire session to persist through any number of successive phone conversations and thereby ensure that Wildfire remained near at hand during routine phone use.

At any time during a Wildfire session, if another person wished to speak to the user, such as an outside caller who had said "Put my call through", Wildfire would announce the caller to the user by name and allow the user to say "I'll take it" or "Take a message". If the user happened to be on another call at the time, the other conversant would hear a phone ring but would not hear the name of the new caller.

In early 1996, conference calling and a rudimentary integration with voicemail systems was added to bolster Wildfire's value among corporate users.

Product Packaging and Deployment
Wildfire was initially offered in the form of a Pentium-based computer chassis and marketed to corporate customers for use as customer-premises equipment suitable for installation alongside the PBXs and voicemail systems commonly located in medium and large office environments. The C.P.E. product was first made available in late 1994 with a cost ($45,000 per server and upward, to interact with 12 or more users simultaneously) and reliance on T1 lines for telephony interface that restricted its marketing to medium to large operations that placed a high value on making telephone connections efficiently.

In order to allow the product to be marketed to individual users, the C.P.E. version was revised to permit small service bureaus to offer Wildfire accounts on a subscription basis. This broadened the product's impact and greatly extended the user base, but technology analysts envisioned that ubiquity could only be achieved when the technology could be added from the telephone service providers. The need to pursue these market outlets was further impressed upon the company by the replacement of Bill Warner as CEO by Rob Mechaley, a member of the board who represented the interests of investor McCaw Cellular, which invested $5M to acquire an eighth of the company, a financial incentive soon followed by a $6M development deal from AT&T Wireless Services and Pacific Telesis announced in October, 1995. Applying these funds under Mechaley's oversight, the company transformed the Wildfire platform to make it more scalable and to make its feature set modular to permit its wide scale deployment through mobile network operators.

The re-architected Wildfire service was deployed on a number of wireless providers, including UK-based Orange PLC in July 1999, who trumpeted their new service offering with advertisements shown before the screenings of the new Star Wars Episode I movie, followed by French carrier Bouygues Telecom in September 1999, and Pacbell Wireless in mid-2000.

Company Sale to Orange
In April 2000, Orange purchased Wildfire Communications for $142M.

Orange continued to offer Wildfire to its wireless subscribers until 2005, when it decided to terminate the product due to insufficiently broad use. Orange customers passionate about Wildfire, particularly those with disabilities who found the speech interface empowering, complained with sufficient force to cause a month's delay in shut-off, but Orange did indeed kill the service in July, 2005.

The original service bureau product is still available from Virtuosity.com.

Technological Legacy
Wildfire directly influenced several widely-used voice user interface-based systems through the work of Blade Kotelly, who moved from a position in usability testing at Wildfire Communications to become Creative Director of Interface Design for SpeechWorks, where he designed richly anthropomorphic systems for United Airlines, E-Trade and other clients. Kotelly wrote of the importance in his design philosophy of creating seemingly human personas for his applications, and said that Wildfire was the best persona he'd seen in a product, "hands down".

Wildfire has also been cited as "a really early version of Siri mostly geared for business execs" and similarities have also been drawn between Wildfire's relaxed conversational style and that of the Apple assistant.