AT&T Plans Electronic Community with Intelligent Assistants: AT&T Personalink Services
PARSIPPANY, N.J. — January 6, 1994 — AT&T today outlined plans for a new network service that will make the much-touted information superhighway more accessible to millions of people.
The new network service, to be called AT&T PersonaLink Services, will serve as the foundation, or "host," for an electronic community–a sort of town center for PersonaLink Services customers: merchants offering their products and services, and people meeting, shopping, working and playing.
Customers will perform all of these activities electronically with th help of electronic "intelligent assistants," pieces of software that can be customized easily to represent each person's unique interests in the electronic community.
The intelligent assistants will be brought to life by Telescript (TM) technology, a new communications language developed by General Magic, a Silicon Valley company. Telescript technology is designed to bring the advantages of electronic communication to millions of people who have not been comfortable using technology in the past.
"AT&T has harnessed this technology," said Dan Rosen, vice president and general manager, AT&T PersonaLink Services, "and will put its power in peoples' hands in the form of these intelligent assistants that will help them conduct their daily activities on our network service–whenever, wherever and however they want."
The intelligent assistants will travel into the PersonaLink Services community and, via simple commands, carry out the customer's instructions to find, buy and sell things, filter the available information to locate exactly what the customer requested, and save the customer time by performing complex transactions.
People who want to access those services, or each other, will be able to subscribe to AT&T PersonaLink Services when they buy a personal communicator or other device with Telescript language capabilities. Every subscriber to AT&T PersonaLink Services will be assigned a mailbox, or address, in the electronic community.
Subscribers also will be able to communicate with other people who have devices with Telescript technology, no matter what brand. Both Motorola and Sony, partners in the General Magic alliance, have said they plan to introduce personal communications devices with the Telescript technology in 1994. EO, Inc., also plans to make Telescript technology available on the AT&T EO personal communicator. People who want to provide services on the electronic community–companies or individuals with products, services or information to sell or share–will work with AT&T to develop their offers for AT&T PersonaLink Services.
When it becomes available during the summer of 1994, AT&T PersonaLink Services will offer a messaging service called PersonaLink Mail, designed by AT&T specifically for PersonaLink Services. PersonaLink Mail also will include a two-way wireless messaging service called PersonaLink wireless service. Other offers on AT&T PersonaLink Services will include a daily news service from Mead Data Central, a shopping service called eShop, and a connection to the Skytel paging network.
There also will be a connection to AT&T EasyLink Services electronic mail services. AT&T EasyLink Services is the market leader in global messaging for the business community. This connection means that PersonaLink Services customers will be able to reach people worldwide on thousands of public and private messaging systems and at any fax machine in the world.
Because of the connection to AT&T EasyLink Services, even people who have devices that don't use Telescript technology will be able to communicate via electronic mail with people using AT&T PersonaLink Services.
A traveling businesswoman could instruct her intelligent assistant to be sure she gets any message from her son who is home with the flu. If she is in a meeting and doesn't have time to keep checking her personal communicator for messages, she can tell the assistant to beep her pager when the message arrives. Then, she could respond by quietly dashing off a note on her personal communicator and sending it wirelessly.
At the same time, she could tell the intelligent assistant to hold messages from certain people in her mailbox for review when she returns to the office, send messages with the word "contract" in the subject line to a fax machine at the hotel, and forward messages from all others to whoever is covering for her at the office.
With eShop, a new shopping service for the electronic community, a customer could use an intelligent assistant as a personal shopper. eShop creates a visual, three-dimensional shopping world with malls and stores. When the customer enters an eShop store, the intelligent assistant, which will have the ability to learn a customer's preferences, would direct him to departments that have special offers matching his interests.
Eventually, the intelligent assistant would be able to send a message reminding the customer that his mother's birthday is coming up and would the customer like the assistant to order mom's favorite flower arrangement and have it delivered?
"We're building this service new from the ground up," said Rosen, "because it is unprecedented in the power it gives each person to direct a network service to do his or her bidding. We'll be working with our partners and our customers to continue to develop AT&T PersonaLink Services to serve our customers one by one."
AT&T PersonaLink Services is being developed by PersonaLink Services, a unit of AT&T EasyLink Services that was formerly known as Consumer Messaging. AT&T EasyLink Services, the global messaging unit of AT&T, serves more than 160 countries with one of the broadest arrays of electronic messaging services in the market, including electronic data interchange, gateways from LAN-based e-mail systems and telex, in addition to electronic mail, enhanced fax and information services.
CONTACT:
Gail Silver
AT&T EasyLink Services
201-331-4132 (office)
908-218-0422 (home)
attmail!gsilver (AT&T Mail)
Gail.Silver(at)ATT.Com (Internet)
or
Bob Garnet AT&T EasyLink Services
201-331-4141 (work)
212-877-0080 (home)
attmail!rgarnet (AT&T Mail)
internet!rgarnet(at)attmail.com (Internet)