From its very beginning, Conversant sought customers wherever it could find them. Internal AT&T applications, both core and peripheral, were important. Some of these would presage commercial applications. The following are a brief list of some of the important commercial applications;
Early Projects (1985-86)
The original Conversant 1 Model 80 was used as the dialing engine for an AT&T Outbound Call Management product. However, prototype applications were sought with many other businesses. Health Care Compare was one of these early applications.
Conversant 3
The transition from the original Model 80 / Model 32 hardware architecture to the PC ISA card hardware architecture also coincided with the first really big commercial deployment — FDRIT Call Interactive. AT&T and American Express had a joint venture with the AmEx subsidiary First Data Resources Interactive Technology in Omaha, NE. Almost the entire Columbus Bell Labs team was involved with almost 1,000 ports of T1 enabled Conversant systems were installed in Omaha. The application provided a new incoming “quiz” advertised during NFL Monday Night Football.
Many Verticals
Close to home in Columbus, Conversant supported an on-line dial-in student reservation system, OSU’s BRUTUS application. At the elementary school level, it provided a Homework Hotline application.
Although there was an AT&T tie-in, Conversant would be used by American Transtech for employee benefits and by Universal Card to support credit card services. Conversant would be used by Travelers Insurance, First Chicago Bank, and American Express for credit card authorization.
Sears, JC Penney, and May Company were retail industry clients and St. Johns Trucking and Conrail in the transportation industry. McCaw Cellular and Rogers Cable would at least do trials with Conversant. Conversant also found itself involved with national politics when the US Congress put in a Conversant application used by one of the houses political whips to alert members to return to the floor for a vote. CBS used a Conversant application to assist in election night coverage for the 1992 Presidential Election.
International
The biggest “feature” of the 1997 Conversant V6 release was support for sale across the globe. Conversant had been sold in the US and Canada, but now it would be a featured product in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), CALA (Caribbean and Latin America), and APAC (Asia Pacific) regions. Staff from Columbus would visit the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain; Mexico, Costa Rica, and Brazil; and Australia, Hong Kong, India, and Japan.
Messaging
Even before a decision was made to consolidate AT&T’s two major speech enabled products, Conversant and Audix, the Columbus R&D team had inherited support for the Voice Power circuit card. This resulted in the Audix Voice Power (AVP) versions 1 through version 3 or 4, AVP Lodging, and AVP Fax Attendant. Eventually, the Columbus organization would support the core platform as Cornerstone which would be the core hardware / software platform for Conversant and Audix.