AT&T; Among Firms Melding Voice, Data Into New Form of Chat Service

Seeking to reclaim some of the voice traffic it has lost to the Internet, AT&T; Corp. has introduced services that allow consumers to call one another anonymously from chat rooms and to organize their own online conference calls.

Among a new breed of products that marry voice communications with data online, AT&T;’s interactive communications is an attempt by the nation’s largest phone company to integrate what’s known as its public switched telephone network with the World Wide Web.

“We’re driving the transformation [online] from text to voice,” said AT&T; spokesman Jonathan Varman. “We’re not just appealing to consumers’ eyeballs on the Internet, but to their eardrums as well.”

But savvy consumers may steer clear of AT&T;’s new chat service because of its high per-minute phone charge. Privacy advocates also raise red flags about what the company will do with the phone numbers it collects through the new services.

The new services include AT&T; Chat ‘N Talk, which is available at https://www.chatntalk.att.com, and AT&T; Click2Dial Conferencing at https://www.click2dial.att.com. There’s also a feature called Click2Dial Directories that allows consumers to call anyone listed in AT&T;’s Anywho directory by visiting https://www.anywho.com.

All of these services require users to have two phone lines--one for connecting to the Internet and one to make the phone call. Only one phone line is required if the user has a cable modem. They also require a PC with at least a 486 processor that runs Windows 95 and Internet Explorer 3.0 or Netscape Navigator 3.0. The service will not work with Macintosh computers.

To call someone from a chat room, consumers click on an icon that reads AT&T; Chat ‘N Talk in a Lycos chat session or sign on to the Chat ‘N Talk Web site. Lycos is the only service provider that currently offers direct access to the chat service. To use Chat ‘N Talk from other chat areas online, consumers need to sign on to the service’s Web site first.

After accessing the service, the call participants step into a private chat room, where each party is asked separately for their phone number to ensure that both parties agree to the call, Varman said. The person who initiated the call is required to enter a credit card number. Participants do not need to be AT&T; customers.

After the network receives phone numbers and credit card information, it sends the phone numbers to an AT&T; switch that connects the parties anonymously. The call requires a 50-cent set-up fee and costs 25 cents per minute for calls in the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii. To ensure privacy, users with caller ID will see the phone number of the switch forwarding the call and not the party with whom they’re being connected.

Although this service changes the dynamics of otherwise static chat rooms, its per-minute charge is enormous when compared with the deals consumers can get in the competitive long-distance market.

“They’re talking about 25 cents a minute--it’s an outrageous price for a long-distance phone call,” said Mark Winther, group vice president of telecommunications at Framingham, Mass.-based market research firm International Data Corp. “Plenty of people out there can get service for 8 cents a minute.”

AT&T; has signed partnership agreements with Lycos, Excite, Infoseek and Yahoo to feature the service in their chat rooms and plans to announce more partners later this year.

AT&T;’s partnership with search engines to sell this service is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to applications that marry voice and data online. This trend could take off when businesses add options to their Web sites that will allow consumers to be connected automatically to a customer service representative, said Forrester Research analyst Paul Hagen.

Numerous companies, including telecommunications firms and those that sell Internet telephony products, are working to make such connections happen.

The AT&T; chat service allows Lycos and others to support customers who already take their conversations from chat rooms to the telephone, said Cory Eaves, group product manager of distribution and online services at Lycos.

“You can say things in chat that you would never dream of saying to people in person,” Eaves said. “Part of the reason you do that is because you aren’t using your real name. Now you can continue that with a phone call.”

Privacy advocates applaud AT&T;’s decision to keep participants’ phone numbers anonymous, but caution there are no guarantees about what AT&T; may do with these numbers.

“We have to ask what AT&T; will do with that kind of information,” said David Banisar, staff counsel for the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Are they going to sell that information to marketers? Are they going to disclose that information if someone wants to know who called them?”

AT&T; says that it must keep the phone numbers on record for auditing purposes but that it won’t use them for other reasons. The phone numbers will not appear on credit card records, Varman said.

Hagen said he expects fewer than 5% of those who use chat services to chat over the phone. And only about one in five U.S. households currently has two phone lines.

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The AT&T; conference-calling feature works just like the chat service, with Netizens signing on to the conferencing Web site and entering the phone number of the party they wish to call.

Once they’re connected to that person, the service asks them if they wish to add other parties to the call. The fee for this service--which is not anonymous--is 15 cents per minute for calls in the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii. The service allows up to seven people to be on the line at once.

Sprint and MCI Communications Corp. also are experimenting with linking voice and data online. Sprint also offers a service that allows users to set up a conference call online.

To use the service, callers, visit https://www.sprintconf.com and type in the phone numbers of call participants and a credit card number. The service is 30 cents a minute and requires two phone lines. Up to eight people can be linked to a call.

MCI’s Click’n Connect is being used by businesses to offer direct customer service from their Web sites. It requires one telephone line, and users must have adequate hardware and software to handle a call that’s transferred via the Internet backbone to the PC (users must have a microphone and speakers to use NetSpeak’s Internet telephony software). The service, which is free to those who contact MCI’s customer service centers, works like a toll-free number for MCI’s business clients.

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Times staff writer Jennifer Oldham can be reached via e-mail at jennifer.oldham@latimes.com.