General Magic folds up shop. (News).

Wireless Week, September, 2002

General Magic, a pioneer of voice application software and services, closed its doors Wednesday and began selling its assets, including its magicTalk Enterprise Platform and 35 patents and patent applications for voice user interface and agent technologies. The company has a temporary 15-member task force to help maintain the virtual advisor telematics services it provided to General Motors' 0nStar program.

General Motors will cover the costs of the service until it finds another vendor. Daniel Miller, senior rice president at the Kelsey Group, said General Magic's demise is unfortunate. "We're definitely entering a period where speech applications are going to be built around personalities," he said. The company had developed a suite of...