Quack.com was an early

voice portal Voice portals are the voice equivalent of web portals, giving access to information through spoken commands and voice responses. Ideally a voice portal could be an access point for any type of information, services, or transactions found on the ...

company. The

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...

later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL.

History

It was founded in 1998 by

Steven Woods Steven Gregory Woods (born June 16, 1965) is a Canadian entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding ''Quack.com'', the first popular Voice portal platform, in 1998. Woods became the head of engineering for Google Canada where he was until 2021 ...

Jeromy Carriere Steven Jeromy Carrière is a Canadian computer software engineer. Carrière is a graduate of the University of Waterloo in Canada. He was technical staff member at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute working on practical so ...

and

Alex Quilici Alex Quilici is an American engineer and businessman. He is a national source of information about robocalls for consumer protection groups, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC's staff, congregational legislators and their tele ...

as a

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

USA The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

, based

infrastructure company named Quackware. Quack was the first company to try to create a voice portal: a consumer-based destination "site" in which consumers could not only access information by voice alone, but also complete transactions. Quackware launched a beta phone service in 1999 that allowed consumers to purchase books from sites such as Amazon and CDs from sites such as CDNow by answering a short set of questions. Quack followed with a set of information services from movie listings (inspired by, but expanding upon,

Moviefone Moviefone is an American-based moving pictures listing and information service. Moviegoers can obtain local showtimes, cinema information, film reviews, and advance tickets, as well as TV content and a comprehensive search tool that allows users ...

) to news, weather and stock quotes. This concept introduced a series of lookalike startups including Tellme Networks which raised more money than any Internet startup in history on a similar concept. Quack received its first

venture funding Venture capital financing is a type of funding by venture capital. It is private equity capital that can be provided at various stages or funding rounds. Common funding rounds include early-stage seed funding in high-potential, growth companies ( ...

from HDL Capital in 1999 and moved operations to Mountain View in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Coun ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

in 1999. A deal with

Lycos Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Walth ...

was announced in May 2000. In September 2000 Quack was acquired for $200 million by America Online (AOL) and moved onto the Netscape campus with what was left of the Netscape team. Quack was attacked in the Canadian press for being representative of the Canadian " brain drain" to the US during the

Internet bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...

, focusing its recruiting efforts on the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

, hiring more than 50 engineers from Waterloo in less than 10 months. Quack competitor Tellme Networks raised enormous funds in what became a highly competitive market in 2000, with the emergence of more than a dozen additional competitors in a 12-month period. Following its acquisition by America Online in an effort led by

Ted Leonsis Theodore John Leonsis (born January 8, 1957) is an American businessman, investor, filmmaker, author, philanthropist, and former politician. He is a former senior executive with America Online (AOL), and the founder, chairman, and CEO of Monument ...

to bring Quack into AOL Interactive, the Quack voice service became AOLbyPhone as one of AOL's "web properties" along with

MapQuest MapQuest (stylized as mapquest) is an American free online web mapping service. It was launched in 1996 as the first commercial web mapping service. MapQuest vies for market share with competitors such as Google Maps and Here. History MapQuest's ...

and others. Quack secured several

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

s that underlie the technical challenges of delivering interactive voice services. Constructing a voice portal required integrations and innovations not only in speech recognition and speech generation, but also in databases, application specification, constraint-based reasoning and artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. "Quack"'s name derived from the company goal of providing not only voice-based services, but more broadly "Quick Ubiquitous Access to Consumer Knowledge". The patents assigned to Quack.com include
System and method for voice access to Internet-based information

System and method for advertising with an Internet Voice Portal
and recognizing the axiom that in interactive voice systems one must "know the set of possible answers to a question before asking it".
System and method for determining if one web site has the same information as another web site
Quack.com was spoofed in ''

The Simpsons ''The Simpsons'' is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical depiction of American life, epitomized by the Simpson family, which consists of Homer Simpson, Homer, Marge ...

'' in March 2002 in the episode " Blame It on Lisa" in which a "ComQuaak" sign is replaced by another equally crazy telecom company name.

2010 onwards

In July 2010, quack.com became the focus of a new AOL iPad application, that was a web search experience. The product delivers web results and blends in picture, video and Twitter results. It enables you to preview the web results before you go to the site, search within each result, and flip through the results pages, making full use of the iPad's touch screen features. The iPad app was free via iTunes, but support discontinued in 2012.

References

External links

* *{{cite web , url=http://quack.com , title=Internet Call Waiting , access-date=March 28, 2009 , url-status=dead , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090122125134/http://quack.com/ , archive-date=January 22, 2009
iTunes App Link
Speech recognition Applications of artificial intelligence Computational linguistics Speech synthesis Speech processing Companies based in Mountain View, California Telecommunications companies of the United States Telecommunications companies established in 1998

History

2010 onwards

See also

References

External links