Ask Jeeves unveils VoIP strategy

By Clare Haney
IDG News Service, 03/07/00

Web information access provider Ask Jeeves today unveiled its voice-over-IP strategy, which will allow the company's corporate clients to hold real-time voice conversations with their customers.

Through a nonexclusive technology swap agreement with Trillium Digital Systems, Ask Jeeves will embed the communication software vendor's H.323 voice-over-IP stack into the Jeeves Live service to enable voice communications over 'Net connections, according to Steve Roop, Ask Jeeves director of product management.

The two companies are already engaging in joint engineering work and Roop expects the first deployments of the voice-over-IP technology to appear in the third quarter of this year. "You'll absolutely see [Ask Jeeves] as one of the first parties to go live," he said. "We eat our own dog food."

Ask Jeeves is best known for its Jeeves Answers service, a natural language question-and-answer format search engine aimed at both individual end users seeking information and corporate customers looking for specific technical data.

The company's Jeeves Live service, aimed at corporate e-business customers, currently facilitates real-time text-based instant messaging between customers and company representatives. The service typically comes into play when a customer reaches a limit on the basic Q&A format and needs to engage another human in conversation in order to close a sale or have a technical query fully answered, Roop said. The addition of voice over IP to Jeeves Live is a yet another step in Ask Jeeves' strategy to "humanize the Net," he added.

Under the terms of the nonexclusive deal announced today, Trillium will gain access to Ask Jeeves' Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (IMPP) standards-based software, Roop said. Once its products are IMPP-enabled, Trillium will be able to offer an end-user presence awareness feature to its customers.

IMPP can determine not only what device a user is working on - be it their home or work PC, a cell phone with Internet access or a 'Net-enabled personal digital assistant - but also what the device's limitations are. For example, the protocol can decide if the device can handle voice over IP, Roop said. Ask Jeeves heads up the group in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working on the IMPP standard, he added. Other members of the IETF group involved in IMPP development include Microsoft, Sun and Lotus.

Ask Jeeves has about 90 corporate customers spread across the telecommunications, financial services, retail and infomedia sectors, Roop said. The firm's IT customers include Microsoft, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, he added.

The company's approach to including voice-over-IP technology in its services differs substantially from that of Ask Jeeves' competitors. The vendor doesn't require customers to add any additional software or services to the network and voice gateways that they already have in place in their existing call center operations, Roop said.

Ask Jeeves can go after both high-end and midsize users through the tie-up with Trillium, Roop stressed.

One of the reasons Ask Jeeves chose to partner with Trillium was the small footprint of the software download - 200K bytes - the company offers to enable PCs with microphones and speakers to become voice over IP-enabled, Roop said. The other suppliers Ask Jeeves looked at before deciding on Trillium offered downloads of more than 1M byte in size, he added.

Ask Jeeves, based in Emeryville, Calif., can be reached at (510) 985-7400 or at www.ask.com/. Trillium Digital Systems, based in Los Angeles, can be reached at (310) 442-9222 or at www.trillium.com/.