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Tom.com Launches Voice Portal
The power of the Internet has been expanded to serve more than 200 million telephone users in China following as popular website www.tom.com's launch of the country's first voice portal on November 24.
The Hong Kong-based website said every telephone user in China, no matter if they use fixed-lines or mobile phones, can now access the Internet by dialing 010-85180012 to use the features on the website.
China has 135 million fixed-line telephone users and 65 million mobile phone users, according to Wang Xin, president of www.tom.com.
Dialing the number, the user can choose among 10 categories of information, including self-financing, news, voice mail, world weather, dinner and hotel reservations, movie reservations, taxi services and world time.
"Voice portal is the combination of Internet and voice recognition technology, it makes the Internet more friendly," Wang said.
With hardware and technology support from IBM and Intel Dialogic, a user's voice is recognized, combined and converted into signals that the system reads.
The voice portal currently only provides putonghua (standard Chinese) services but English and Cantonese versions are soon to be launched.
"The launching of the voice portal opened a new profit pool for the company and at the same time can help more people enjoy the convenience of the Internet," said an official of the Ministry of Information Industry, who attended the launch ceremony but declined to be named.
Tom.com entered the mainland Internet market in July, with the acquisition of several smaller websites.
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