Digital Secretary, With Attitude Portico is a service that allows you to get your voice mail, E-mail, appointments, and address book from any telephone. Just be nice when you ask it for a favor.
By Joel Dreyfuss

(FORTUNE Magazine) – I've always hated voice mail. That's a dislike that baffled me for years, given that I am someone who has always embraced cutting-edge technologies. Recently, however, I figured out the reason--voice mail didn't give me enough control. Remembering the arcane commands to skip messages, fast-forward, rewind, or save calls was impossible. Worse, anytime I switched from one voice-mail system to another, I had to memorize a whole new set of commands.

Well, I've finally found a voice-mail system that gives the kind of control that I feel I deserve. In fact, with Portico, a service from General Magic in Sunnyvale, Calif., I don't have to remember whether to press * 3 or # 7, because Portico handles my needs with simple voice commands. And I get control over a lot more than mere voice mail.

General Magic pitches Portico as a virtual assistant. With the synthesized voice of a sharp, efficient woman, Portico takes your messages, forwards your calls, reads you your E-mail, keeps track of your tasks, and schedules your appointments. In many ways it resembles Wildfire, a fancy answering service that's been around since 1994. Although generally well reviewed, Wildfire hasn't caught on widely. Portico may do better, given that it does such a good job with so much more than simple voice mail.

Ultimately, what makes Portico a terrific product is the way it melds our most commonly used communications device, the telephone, with our most hyped technology, the Internet. To start, you need to get the name and phone number of a reseller from the General Magic Website (www.portico.net). When you call to sign up, you'll receive a personal toll-free telephone number and password. Portico's prices start at $19.95 for 60 minutes a month; your costs can escalate quickly into three figures.

Next you return to the General Magic Website and set your preferences, entering your phone numbers, pager number, and fax. You can have Portico pick up your Internet mail. You can also type in appointments and tasks that you want Portico to track, but there are better ways to do this, as I'll explain later.

Once you're set up, you can dial your Portico number from anywhere around the world. The service answers with a standard greeting, which you can interrupt by saying, "It's me." Portico asks for your password, which you can punch in or simply recite. Portico then declares, "I'm at the desktop." The service's desktop metaphor offers the options of mailbox (i.e., phone messages and E-mail), address book, calendar, newspaper, and stock report. If you say, "Open my mailbox," Portico tells you how many new messages you have and begins to read them. If it's a voice message, it plays back the name of the caller and his telephone number. You can choose to hear the message, skip it, or have Portico return the call.

Portico will also read your E-mail over the phone (unfortunately, it abandons the woman's voice for this task, replacing it with a monotonous, vaguely Norwegian male voice). You can reply to E-mail with a voice message, which Portico sends as a sound file attached to an electronic message.

Portico will also read your appointments in response to voice commands. The system is pretty good at figuring out what you want even when you stray from the recommended phrases. Asking "What's my next appointment?" "Tell me my appointments for Wednesday," and "Do I have any appointments today?" didn't fluster Portico. Sometimes, however, the system has to pause before answering. Occasionally, Portico even gives up: " I'm sorry," she says, "I didn't understand that."

Portico's truly a full-service assistant. You can add appointments by voice, indicating whom you're meeting, where, and for how long. Portico will read quotes for stocks you track and news stories about those companies, all according to preferences you establish on the Portico Website. Portico lets you know if you've received E-mail from key contacts. And, of course, Portico handles your phone traffic, forwarding calls, paging you when you have voice mail, and taking messages.

Portico was launched at the end of the summer, and it is still shaking out the bugs. The promotional material says you can upload PalmPilot appointments, contacts, and tasks to Portico, but as of mid-October that option was not working. I had to dump my Palm data into Microsoft Outlook before I could transfer my appointments. Portico then advanced all my appointments by three hours. The paging service was also buggy.

Oh, well. For the most part, Portico is an efficient service with a terrific "personality." Sometimes it's even got an attitude. I once ordered Portico to forward all my calls to my home number--but I had forgotten that the answering machine was on at home. This apparently caused Portico some distress. When I got home, Portico had left a rather snippy message: "Well, I don't know what to do, so I'll just take a message." It's hard to get good help nowadays.