computer science

Quack.com

Quack.com is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Quack.com rather than just read about it. In short: Quack.com was an early voice portal company. The domain name later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL.

Key takeaways

Quack.com belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Quack.com to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Quack.com from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Quack.com was an early voice portal company. The domain name later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL.

History It was founded in 1998 by Steven Woods, Jeromy Carriere and Alex Quilici as a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, based voice portal infrastructure company named Quackware. Quack was the first company to try to create a voice portal: a consumer-based destination "site" in which consumers could not only access information by voice alone, but also complete transactions. Quackware launched a beta phone service in 1999 that allowed consumers to purchase books from sites such as Amazon and CDs from sites such as CDNow by answering a short set of questions. Quack followed with a set of information services from movie listings (inspired by, but expanding upon, Moviefone) to news, weather and stock quotes. This concept introduced a series of lookalike startups including Tellme Networks which raised more money than any Internet startup in history on a similar concept. Quack received its first venture funding from HDL Capital in 1999 and moved operations to Mountain View in Silicon Valley, California in 1999. A deal with Lycos was announced in May 2000. In September 2000 Quack was acquired for $200 million by America Online (AOL) and moved onto the Netscape campus with what was left of the Netscape team. Quack was attacked in the Canadian press for being representative of the Canadian "brain drain" to the US during the Internet bubble, focusing its recruiting efforts on the University of Waterloo, hiring more than 50 engineers from Waterloo in less than 10 months. Quack competitor Tellme Networks raised enormous funds in what became a highly competitive market in 2000, with the emergence of more than a dozen additional competitors in a 12-month period. Following its acquisition by America Online in an effort led by Ted Leonsis to bring Quack into AOL Interactive, the Quack voice service became AOLbyPhone as one of AOL's "web properties" along with MapQuest, Moviefone and others. Quack secured several patents that underlie the technical challenges of delivering interactive voice services. Constructing a voice portal required integrations and innovations not only in speech recognition and speech generation, but also in databases, application specification, constraint-based reasoning and artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. "Quack"'s name derived from the company goal of providing not only voice-based services, but more broadly "Quick Ubiquitous Access to Consumer Knowledge". The patents assigned to Quack.com include: System and method for voice access to Internet-based information, System and method for advertising with an Internet Voice Portal and recognizing the axiom that in interactive voice systems one must "know the set of possible answers to a question before asking it". System and method for determining if one web site has the same information as another web site. Quack.com was spoofed in The Simpsons in March 2002 in the episode "Blame It on Lisa" in which a "ComQuaak" sign is replaced by another equally crazy telecom company name.

2010 onwards In July 2010, quack.com became the focus of a new AOL iPad application, that was a web search experience. The product delivers web results and blends in picture, video and Twitter results. It enables you to preview the web results before you go to the site, search within each result, and flip through the results pages, making full use of the iPad's touch screen features. The iPad app was free via iTunes, but support discontinued in 2012.

See also List of speech recognition software

References

External links Official website "Internet Call Waiting". Archived from the original on January 22, 2009. Retrieved March 28, 2009. iTunes App Link

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Quack.com

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Quack.com claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Quack.com before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Quack.com ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Quack.com

In research: Quack.com appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Quack.com in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Quack.com is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Companies based in Mountain View, California, Computational linguistics, Speech processing, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Quack.com outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Quack.com in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Quack.com means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Quack.com out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Quack.com in simple terms?

Quack.com was an early voice portal company. The domain name later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL.

Why does Quack.com matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Quack.com?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Quack.com.