Tellme Acquired for Its Voice Platform

Tellme, a 320-employee firm that builds and hosts customized voice-activated services, will be incorporated into the Microsoft Business Division, which is responsible for products such as Office and Exchange, and Microsoft’s emerging unified communications portfolio. As with many other acquisitions, the terms of the acquisition were not made public, but reports put it in the vicinity of US$1 billion, making it Microsoft’s largest acquisition in at least four years. The deal is expected to close by the end of June 2007.

Tellme’s Hosted Services

Tellme’s customer service applications are used by large businesses, and the company also provides free voice-activated phone-based information services directly to consumers. The company, based in Mountain View, CA, claims that during 2006, voice-activated applications hosted on the company’s interactive voice response (IVR) platform processed 10 billion “speech utterances” and that one third of the people in the United States used a Tellme application. The company’s data centers host fee-based 411 directory assistance, package tracking, and a multitude of other forms of phone-based customer service applications on behalf of companies such as American Airlines, Cingular/AT&T, E*TRADE Financial, FedEx, Merrill Lynch, and Verizon.