EARFUL OF INTERNET / Voice portals read news and other information via phone to users on the go

Diane Paulsen was worried that her vacation in Los Angeles would be rained out after beginning the drive from San Francisco in a storm.

To alleviate her concerns, she called the Internet. She spoke to a computer that understands verbal commands and was "told" in an automated voice that the weather in Southern California was balmy.

At least a dozen companies have launched or are developing so-called voice portals that allow people to listen to parts of the Internet by telephone. Consumers use speech instead of a computer mouse to navigate information like weather, sports, restaurants, traffic reports and movie reviews.

The primary goal is to give cellular phone users access to the Internet with minimal hassles. Companies claim that it is more convenient for people on the road to have the Web read to them than to bother with the tiny screens and buttons on wireless devices like Internet enabled telephones and Palm handheld units.

"There's a lot of companies at the starting gate," said Dana Thorat, a consumer technology analyst for IDC, a market research company. "These services will work especially well for mobile road warriors who are looking for specific things like an Italian restaurant within 10 miles."

But the question remains whether voice portals will be popular enough to be profitable. With such a crowded field of competing companies and little known about consumer demand, their futures are unclear, some analysts say.

Driving the dramatic growth of the voice portal industry are improvements in speech-recognition technology. For the most part, users can now navigate the services without being misunderstood by the computers that operate them.

Executives invariably mention the 85 million cellular telephones used in the United States as a sign of their industry's potential. If only a small percentage of those were used to dial into voice portals, executives say, the revenue would be substantial.

One indication of how popular these services could be are newspaper telephone hotlines, which have offered some of the same information from satellite feeds for years. For example, The Chronicle's free touch-tone telephone service, Directory On Call, gets nearly 400,000 calls a month.

However, voice portal company executives say their services are easier to use, safer for drivers and offer more features. Indeed, some companies already allow consumers to be connected to restaurants, get driving directions, make free long- distance telephone calls and browse flight information.

"When we talk to consumers, they say, 'I don't want to call in and surf the Web and listen to long news reports,' " said Amol Joshi, co- founder and vice president of products for BeVocal, a voice portal in Santa Clara that will be launched in the Bay Area in a few weeks, but is now available on a trial basis. "They want to call for something specific and personalized like directions to the nearest Federal Express box and the time of the latest pickup."

A handful of other voice portals like Talk2 of Salt Lake City and Internet Speech of San Jose believe differently. They are working on technology that reads all Web pages, minus the links and graphics, not just the limited selection offered by other companies like BeVocal.

To use a voice portal, consumers usually call a toll-free number and say a keyword of their choice like "restaurants." A recorded voice usually asks more specific questions like "what city" and "what kind of food."

After responding, the users are given a list of choices, addresses and in some cases reviews. To search another topic, users must say something like "go back."

Paulsen, the Los Angeles-bound woman who searched for a weather report, said the voice portal she used, Quack.com of Sunnyvale, is relatively easy to navigate, though it has one shortcoming -- it lists only restaurants in Minneapolis; others could be added in the future.

How voice portals plan to make money varies. Most are free, though users must be willing to listen to short commercials.

Companies expect to supplement their advertising revenue with fees for connecting users to online commerce sites and partnerships with telecommunications companies. For example, Tellme Networks, a Mountain View voice portal available to the public for testing, announced a $60 million deal with AT&T on Monday.

Companies also hope to make money by building voice portals for other firms. For example, Quack.com said this week that it would build a similar service for Lycos.

But there are potential barriers to the industry's success, at least in the short term. Andrew Seybold, editor of the Outlook, a monthly newsletter about mobile and wireless technologies, said the services do not work well when users call from a noisy location like an airport and do not yet allow access to important information like appointment calendars.

"The technology is not quite ready for prime time," Seybold said. "It's going to be a few years before they get this right."

The quality of the automated voice is another concern. Companies use recorded human voices when possible but rely on computer speech for reading some content.

"The risk with voice is pretty high," said Mohan Vishwanath, vice president for wireless technology at Yahoo, which is planning its own voice portal. "If it doesn't sound right, people will turn it off."

As it is, relatively few people know that voice portals exist, and many of those who do use them do so infrequently. Like the Internet industry a few years ago, voice portals must teach consumers that they need their services.

"I think there will be a lot of occasional use like people sitting in a parking lot trying to find out where to go to lunch," Seybold said. "I don't think people will use it a lot. But it depends mostly on how good the service is."

Mike McCue, chief executive of Tellme Networks, said his company is one of the few trying to attract all kinds of consumers, not just ones with cellular telephones. He expects people without computers and those who don't want to go through the hassle of logging on will use the service.

"We're going after normal everyday people," McCue said. "Not superwired people."

Nevertheless, nearly everyone agrees that Internet enabled wireless telephones and, for that matter, personal computers, will survive the voice portal phenomenon. Automated voices take a relatively long time to read large amounts of text out loud and cannot describe graphics.

One consumer who is pleased with her voice portal is Juliette Silvers, a blind woman from Minneapolis. She uses Quack about once a week, usually to check the weather because she finds it more accurate than a touch-tone phone service that she sometimes calls.

"I can't believe that they aren't charging for it," Silvers said. "It's very easy to use. You don't even think of it as a computer."

SOME VOICE PORTALS