GUIs face up to the future

The majority of computing power is spent presenting data to humans.

We are the important element in the equation. We need to know what information means and shouldn't have to wade through a ton of data to find what we want.

Today, we use a lot of graphical user interfaces. Almost everybody is a 'Wimp', a user of windows, icons, menus and a pointer (the mouse).

It's a long time since we had to peer at images of binary blips on a cathode ray tube. IBM's green glass 3277 display in the 1970s, showing numerals and characters, brought a new generation of users.

Then came another big leap forward with the interface implemented as Wimps, devised by Xerox at Palo Alto Research Centre.

Why should the presentation of data stop there? The Acorns featured here are all rising to this challenge and are looking at new ways to present data.

It's the location that counts, says the estate agent. Why are locations represented as postcodes or addresses, or regions when they arecoordinates on a map?

Why not present them as points on a map? Why not present the results of processed data with a geographical component in graphical form?

A postcode may tell you a location is in Birmingham. But only by looking at a map will you realise that your drop-off points are on the west of the city when you are about to start building a warehouse in the east.

Such applications can save users thousands of pounds once managers can see geographical information in a graphical form.

Visual Information is developing, marketing, selling, supporting and devising services for geographic applications for the user with its Vi Business Analyst toolkit.

Listening is easier than reading. If we can turn text into speech we have a powerful tool of communication.

Rhetorical Systems, a spin-off from Edinburgh University, is developing bespoke voices generated by a computer for applications such as the web. The user asks a question and the answer is given in an accent they understand.

Now take the text-to-speech technology of Rhetorical and build a user-friendly, real-time generated, animated 'agent' to respond to the user.

This is the work of Lexicle, a York-based Acorn building friendly interfaces for applications.

These young companies may be in the process of changing our relationship with our computers.

CASE STUDY - RHETORICAL SYSTEMS
Marc Moens, co-founder and chief executive of Rhetorical Systems, takes a 'glass half-full' view of life.

Conventional wisdom suggested that he and his colleagues should wait to launch the company until better economic weather, but Moens believes in seizing the moment.

"If we had started before the height of the boom, we would have been given a very unrealistic valuation," he says.

So the 45-year-old and his co-founders - chief technical officer Paul Taylor, 34, and chairman Peter Denyer, 49 - made a leap of faith with their text-to-speech venture in April 2000.

The core technology comes from Taylor and Moens's work at Edinburgh University on language processing. It focuses on turning text into speech, which a listener cannot distinguish from the human voice.

The mission, which Rhetorical has chosen to accept, is to build voices fast and cost-effectively. English is the first language, but with UK, US, Australian, Scottish and even Southern California Valley accents. The company also set up a German operation in late 2002.

About 60 per cent of the turnover comes from the UK, the rest comes from the German and US sales offices.

Rhetorical started with consultancy in text-to-speech before finalising product development. The company employs 15 staff in support sales and marketing, with a further 30 based in Edinburgh to develop the technology and support customers.

It has taken nearly £6.3m of funding in two rounds to build the company. The first round (£2.1m) was used to get the product into commercial form and win early recognition.

The second phase, in October 2001, was raised on the back of a full business plan. This called for profit generation in 2003, which Moens says is achievable.

Rhetorical has applied for six patents. Otherwise it protects its know-how simply by not revealing it.

Denyer has provided the expertise to launch the firm. He had done it before and told Moens, whom he met by accident, that launching a company with the technology was possible.

The poor economic climate has taught Moens that launches can be successful: Acorns should go for it when they are ready, and not when the economy dictates.

Expanding the company is still tough, especially in the US market where customers need to be persuaded to buy from a Scottish-based vendor when there are larger competitors around such as SpeechWorks and ScanSoft.

Rhetorical, unlike its rivals, intends to concentrate on text-to-speech technology. If a user wants voice recognition, Rhetorical will enter partnerships, says Moens.

Text-to-speech also needs an evangelistic attitude and approach to marketing, he says.

"We have to show them what they can do with an exclusive branded voice; often we do that with an appropriate partner or integrator."

At least the company doesn't have to evangelise about Edinburgh, he adds. It's easy to persuade people to move there because of its community of software engineers.

And Rhetorical needs an international workforce to get the accents right. You need native speakers to understand how to get the nuances into additional voices.

CASE STUDY - VISUAL INFORMATION
Visual information (VI) is a family affair, the Morrison family business.

Dad Neil, 60, writes the code in Visual Basic and other Microsoft development tools, while mum Marion, 57, does the books. Their daughter Lynette, 29, is the managing director and son Stuart, 28, is a part-time director.

Between them, they claim to have developed, as a product or as a bureau service, "the spreadsheet of the 21st century".

Vi Business Analyst (ViBA), a front-end database containing geographical information, generates a graphical representation of data rather than creating a table.

By plugging ViBA onto your Open Database Connectivity-compliant database, with the postcodes of customers, it's easy to see where your best and worst customers are. It will also show where to locate a warehouse for the best logistics.

Because ViBA is a visual product, standard paper-based literature doesn't do it justice, says Neil. It's a long sales cycle in which the end user has to be educated about visual analysis, adds Lynette.

Users do not have to be techies or have extensive training in data analysis to use the software. This is the key to its success so far.

Neil claims that ViBA wins in head-to-head competition against its American rival MapInfo because it's 70 per cent faster.

So far, customers include polling company ICM Research. Visual Information also has a 200-user trial signed up by a major consultancy.

Users can test ViBA before they buy it, if they use the bureau service. For about £450, a user can run four or five data analyses.

Lynette is relying on direct marketing to win customers. She is using telemarketing, networking and personal recommendations. The website is now getting 900 hits a month.

The development and marketing is all financed by family funds. "There is no such thing as seed capital before you generate revenues," says Lynette. "We spent a lot of time seeking it out - it doesn't exist."

VI is burning about £6,000 a month. The family earn minimum salaries and work in Neil's converted loft.

They obtained a £45,000 grant from the Department of Trade and Industry to fund development of 3D features, which will be incorporated into ViBA over the next six months.

VI is now seeking another grant to market the software. Lynette hopes to recruit two new sales and marketing people, which will mean moving from the loft.

Moving out of the family home near Reading and employing outsiders will change the company - Lynette wants to build it up to corporate size.

As soon as VI has a substantial customer base, it may seek outside funding to grow faster.

CASE STUDY - LEXICLE
Of course, says Patrick Olivier, 36, to his friend Andrew Ormsby, 41, there are no commercial prospects for the research I am doing.

Ormsby begs to differ, looking at the animated figure on the screen speaking the results of queries made against a database.

Lexicle, a York-based start-up, is the result of research by Olivier and his fellow academic Suresh Manandhar, 40, with the business nous of Ormsby and Garry Avery, 34.

They used the funds of two angel investors who took 20 per cent of the business and started the firm in January 2001. Olivier's work was based on generating the mouth movements of an animated figure, so that it answered queries typed in by users.

Lexicle's product is an animated, real-time, friendly front-end for queries. It's the type of interface consumers want when they go to a site and ask questions.

The financial services industry, for example, has complex products, which are poorly understood by customers. 1st Direct's mortgage arm is using the animated agent at www.firstdirect.com/smartmortgage to help answer customer queries.

It costs between £10 and £20 to handle an incoming call to a call centre. If the customer used the web, the cost drops to between 10p and 20p, says Ormsby.

Users could achieve these savings for the outlay of about £100,000 for the software.

Lexicle would be happy to build a charging model around the number of conversations supported, or the peak loading of the system, says Ormsby.

Customers want to ask their own questions and get a meaningful reply. That is why they go to the call centre. They do not want to scroll through pages of FAQs devised by others who don't know their circumstances.

Taking the query on the fly is part of the AI research supplied by Olivier and Manandhar.Lexicle employs eight full-time staff. Seven are developers, mainly students from York University where Olivier and Manandhar worked.

The start-up uses the voice-generation software by fellow Acorn, Rhetorical Systems.

The Lexicle product comes in three parts: a server engine, authoring for the database-owner, and a report part to generate documents on the volume of queries.

The server engine generates software and downloads it to run on the user's client PC.

Lexicle is burning about £20,000 to £25,000 a month to complete with larger rivals, but it aims to be in the black by the first quarter of 2004.