The first attempt at an online assistant I can remember was Ask Jeeves. I think the biggest difference in changing from a text interface to a spoken one is cla

The first attempt at an online assistant I can remember was Ask Jeeves. I think the biggest difference in changing from a text interface to a spoken one is clarity in the spoken voice, and it's much more difficult to make a text-to-speech system easy to understand with a masculine voice than a feminine one.