Tom Pirelli pads around his suburban home talking to himself, a small gold-toned plastic device attached to one ear.
Star Trek fans would recognize the gadget: It looks like the earset worn by Starship Enterprise’s communicator, Lt. Uhura.
“Blinds up,” Pirelli says. Voila! Light fills the room.
“Play Madonna’s `Ray of Light,'” he commands. His stereo complies.
Now for the hard part.
Soon the 53-year-old engineer will find out whether his technical wizardry can turn on the business world.
He and partner Jim Alland will introduce their Vernon Hills company’s first product Saturday at a national trade show. Called ArialPhone, it applies the technology Pirelli uses in his home to the telephone.
The product manages incoming calls and dials, by name or telephone number, on spoken command. Pirelli and Alland are betting busy professionals will pay $399 for a phone system that interacts with their computers to let them roam homes or offices with hands and eyes free.
Down the road, Pirelli envisions Arial’s technology incorporated into a host of devices for people who would rather talk to their appliances than push buttons. His company is one of dozens rushing to market products that tether the physical world to our spoken wishes. The reason: voice-recognition technology has become cheaper and more reliable.
“Some of these applications will become part of our everyday life,” says John Oberteuffer, publisher of ASR News, which tracks the industry.
But many won’t.
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A decade ago, consumers could buy voice-controlled TV remotes. The product–too pricey and hard to use–flopped.
Pirelli knows the risks well. His first company, started when he was a 22-year-old Princeton grad, sold then-novel electronic systems for cash registers. A company called NCR came along and whisked his market away.
Years later, he went out on his own after his bosses at the former American Hospital Supply fired him because they thought his experiments with then-new Apple computers were wasting money.
“The best thing that ever happened to me,” Pirelli says of the setback.
He founded Enterprise Systems in 1982–naming it for Star Trek’s spaceship–and began developing software to make hospitals more efficient.
He ran through $30,000 in savings keeping his start-up afloat, then was forced to sell his Oldsmobile Toronado to meet payroll. He rented a Pinto.
His luck finally changed when he attracted investors that included the late Robert Noyce, Intel’s co-founder.
Enterprise thrived, growing by the mid-1990s to $55 million in sales and 400 employees. But in a consolidating industry, the company needed to get bigger or be acquired. Pirelli chose the latter.
Enterprise went public in 1995. Two years later, it sold for $250 million.
Pirelli tried retiring–he played golf for two weeks in Hawaii–but quickly got bored. So he started Arial with Enterprise’s former president, Alland.
Pirelli’s home became a laboratory. He had played with speech-recognition technology since 1978 when he taught an Apple computer to respond to simple verbal commands in a game of tic-tac-toe.
Pirelli wanted a telephone that would free his hands and eyes. So, with Lt. Uhura in mind, he began modeling earpieces out of clay. He draped the twistable trunk of his daughter’s plastic elephant-shaped reading light around his ear to see how much weight his ear could support. Answer: Four ounces is too much.
ArialPhone’s earset, weighing 1.25 ounces, is powered by a rechargeable battery the size of a stick of gum.
“All lights out,” Pirelli says before pulling off his earset at night. His obedient home goes dark.
Here’s hoping Arial’s fortunes shine brightly.
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