Tellme, and a host of other start-ups with names like BeVocal and Quack.com, hope to shake up something else: the telephone. The companies are called “voice portals,” and you can think of them as MovieFone on steroids. Riding a wave of investor interest in extending the Internet past the PC, they aim to take the full range of features of a Web portal like Yahoo and transfer them to an 800 number with the help of the rapidly evolving field of speech recognition. On Tellme, for instance, which launched a nationwide trial last week, you can call and ask for “stocks.” Then, without touching the keypad, you say a company’s name and get the share price, plus an audio feed of its latest news. There are similar features for sports, weather, traffic, restaurants and, soon, a variety of other e-commerce services. Ex-Netscape VP Peter Currie, a Tellme board member and investor alongside former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, calls this “dial tone 2.0” and sees it as an extension of the Web for the nonwired set: “We have the advantage of using the reach of an existing distribution system with 2 billion users. Everybody over the age of 2 knows how to use a phone.”

For now, though, Tellme is focusing on building a friendly, easy-to-use service, due to launch in June. In a day of meetings last week, employees wrestled with the basic questions of how a voice portal should behave. Should they create a backup system of touch-tone prompts, since voice recognition is not yet completely reliable? How much should they charge advertisers for five-second sponsorships (“It’s Tellme Sports, brought to you by Poweraid,” for example). These are decisions that need to be made soon, as Tellme gradually adds trial users and hopes to beat competitors to a widespread launch. But Tellme execs also can’t help themselves from looking ahead. McCue says the company has recorded the names and addresses of 200,000 restaurants in the United States, and plans to start adding other businesses. Users will be able to look up a store, then get driving directions or be automatically connected to it by phone, at no charge.

There are still some big hurdles before the world accepts companies like Tellme. Though the cost of an 800 call has fallen below five cents per minute, the voice portals will still have large fixed costs, and it’s not clear that short audio ads or e-commerce revenues can cover them. Then there are phone companies like BellSouth, which themselves might enter the fray. It’s also not clear that users will even warm to voice portals. Seamus McAteer, a senior analyst at Jupiter Communications, notes that folks used to Web browsing or getting info on their mobile-phone screens might get impatient just listening. “With a Web browser, it’s a lot easier to get the info that you want,” he says. But with start-ups like Tellme, Silicon Valley is making a big bet that there’s still a place at the table for the 120-year-old telephone.