Microsoft Tellme

» see tellme.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Tellme was a US service at the layer of its existence. From an american phone number you dialed 1-800-555-TELL and answered the prompts in plain english. The line read back weather or sports scores in a synthesized voice. Nothing about that crossed the atlantic. The whole product depended on owning a memorable toll-free number and partnerships with the US carriers that routed the calls.

The company launched in April 1999 in Mountain View, run by Mike McCue and Angus Davis, and lived through the dot-com bust as one of the few B2C voice services that survived. The peak years were 2001 to 2006, when Tellme handled directory assistance for AT&T and several smaller US carriers, plus the back end of a string of corporate IVR systems. The pitch to investors was that talking to your phone was going to replace typing on it, with Tellme positioned as the company that owned the voice layer.

Microsoft acquired Tellme on March 14, 2007 for around eight hundred million dollars, betting that voice search would become the front end of mobile. The Tellme back end ended up powering Bing 411 from 2009 onward, a free 1-800-BING-411 voice search service explicitly designed to compete with the existing GOOG-411 service Google had launched a few months earlier. Then smartphones happened. Both services died within months of each other. Microsoft pulled Bing 411 on June 1, 2012 and divested the underlying IVR engine to 24/7 Inc. that same month. The Tellme phone number bounced around the IVR aftermarket for the rest of the decade and the last toll-free line was finally deactivated in July 2020.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

The product was unusual for being a free consumer service that lived entirely inside the telephone system. There was no app to install. There was no website to remember. You learned the number from a magazine or a radio ad and dialed it, then held a conversation with a computer. For an american commuter stuck in traffic in 2003 with a flip phone, Tellme was a faster way to get a movie listing than tabbing through ten layers of WAP menus.

~ what it became ~

Microsoft folded Tellme into its mobile and search divisions after the 2007 acquisition. The technology ended up inside the Microsoft Voice Command feature on Windows Mobile and later under the hood of the Cortana speech stack. Bing 411 was the most visible consumer product to come out of the integration, and it ran from June 2009 to June 2012 against a similar Google service that died about a year before it did.

~ the day it died ~

The smartphone killed Tellme cleanly. By 2011 anyone with an iPhone or an Android device could open Google Maps or Yelp and get the same information faster than the 1-800 line could read it back. A toll-free voice portal had no answer to a screen. Microsoft shipped the Bing 411 shutdown notice in May 2012 and took the service offline on June 1. The rest of the IVR business went to 24/7 Inc. that same month. The brand name Tellme survived inside Microsoft for a few more years as a feature name on enterprise contact-center products, and the very last legacy toll-free line went dark in July 2020.

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