Nearly one year after General Magic Inc. introduced its Portico virtual assistant service, the company has plans to add several enhancements to the service, free to customers.
Buck Krawczyk, vice president of communications at General Magic, said the company gathered information from customers through focus groups, questionnaires and phone surveys to find out what kinds of features customers most want in Portico. General Magic said it plans to unveil three new enhancements this week that will be available to customers by mid-July.
The first enhancement is support for in-bound faxes. Krawczyk said the feature will allow a customer’s Portico number to be used as a fax number, allowing subscribers to forward incoming faxes to any fax machine or display them on a computer. Portico already supports outbound faxes, he said.
Another feature General Magic is adding to Portico is the ability for users to customize their outgoing greeting. Krawczyk said many customers reported they want to elaborate on the initial greeting beyond just their name, to include the name of their business or another more detailed message.
General Magic also is adding customizable call screening to Portico, which will allow users to select from several pre-recorded questions to screen inbound callers.
General Magic said all of the enhancements will be made available at no additional cost to current Portico users.
In addition, Krawczyk outlined some features General Magic is developing for Portico, including notification of e-mails, voice mails, appointments, stock quotes and other information via the company’s Kenya voice agent. Krawczyk said the application has the potential for a variety of other uses, including notifying customers when their flight is delayed, or notifying online auction participants when they have been outbid and allowing them to raise their bid via Portico.
Krawczyk said that application will be the first to use the Kenya platform, which the company announced earlier this year.
The company also is developing a feature that would allow customers to record messages using Portico’s voice user interface and then forward those messages to other Portico users’ mailboxes as well as to non-Portico customers.
A function that would allow users to file their e-mails, voice messages and faxes via voice also is in the works. Currently, customers have the option of saving or deleting messages.
