Wildfire Communications

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

~ the obituary ~

In October 1994 I was ten years old in Turkey, four years away from my first modem. The telephone in the house was for calling people. The idea that you could call a piece of software, say its name out loud, and have it answer you was not something within reach of anywhere I lived, and it would be nearly two decades before a version of it arrived in a pocket.

Wildfire was a speech-based electronic assistant that lived in the phone network. You called it, it greeted you, and you talked to it in ordinary sentences. Route this call. Take a message. Who called me. It handled your calendar and your contacts, it screened callers, and it did all of this over a plain voice line in the year Netscape shipped its first browser.

Bill Warner had founded Avid Technology in 1987 and changed how film and video got edited. Wildfire Communications was his next company, started in 1992 in Massachusetts with Rich Miner, Nick d'Arbeloff and Tony Lovell. What they built was not a menu tree with voice on top. It was designed to feel like a person who worked for you, and the design worked well enough that customers got attached in a way that later caused Orange a public relations problem.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The product went to carriers rather than consumers, which was the only distribution that existed for a telephone service in the nineties. Orange bought the whole company in April 2000 for 142 million dollars and ran Wildfire as a subscriber feature for its wireless customers in the UK and France.

Then it sat there. Voice interfaces in 2000 were expensive to run and hard to explain in a carrier brochure, and the people who used Wildfire used it constantly while everybody else never tried it once. That is a bad shape for a line item. By 2005 Orange had decided the numbers did not justify the platform and announced it would end the service in May.

~ the next chapter ~

The complaints were loud enough to buy a month. Orange had underestimated how many blind and visually impaired subscribers had made Wildfire their entire interface to the telephone, not because it was built for accessibility but because a voice-first system happens to be the most accessible thing in the world. It was killed in July 2005 anyway. Nothing Orange offered replaced it.

Rich Miner left and co-founded Android Inc, which Google bought in 2005, which means the person who helped build a talking phone assistant in 1994 also helped build the operating system that would eventually ship one to a billion handsets. Siri arrived on the iPhone in October 2011, six years after Orange decided there was no demand.

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