hmmmm
Nice find, CAE ... I wonder ...
What does everyone else think??
Here's a good article, thanks to EDVIRTUAL:
<<<Voice Portals Scream $26 Billion Future
(10/18/99; 3:00 PM EST)
By Madeleine Acey, TechWeb
Voice is the natural messaging and information medium, and intelligent agents provided by cellular phone companies will become a $26 billion market by 2005, according to a report released Monday.
Called "personal assistant services," such products already allow hands-free dailing and automatically create contact records from caller identification data captured by the phone. But soon, uses will be able to order a pizza and book plane tickets while driving or check and return phone messages through a Web interface, analysts said.
"An early example at the moment is I can press the voice mail button on my mobile phone and a voice says, 'What can I do for you?' I say, 'Call Jenny,' and it makes the call for me," said Dan Ridsdale, an analyst at London-based researcher Ovum and author of the report. "It can play back my messages and call those people back. It can allow you to say you don't want calls from these people, but these people have priority."
Ridssdale said in the very near future, services will be launched where "you dial your personal assistant and say, 'I'd like a pizza.' It would say, 'I have Pizza Hut's number. Would you like me to call them?' and Pizza Hut will pay a lot of money to be first on the pizza list."
He said the advent of Wireless Internet Protocol (WAP) would bring a visual interface to these services for when voice is not the desired medium -- for example, when the user wants privacy.
"If compared to the personal computing market, telephony is still in the era of the DOS prompt," he said. "PC usage exploded when DOS was replaced by Windows. A large factor in this is that user interfaces have become more intuitive and user-friendly, bringing the functionality of the PC to telecommunications."
He said though many of these services had been launched as stand-alone offerings, improvements in speech recognition, expanding Internet use, and the arrival of microbrowsers on phones would see a massive market emerge.
"Personal assistant service providers will effectively own the customer interface, becoming the users' personal portal into the network," he said.
Karen Sinclair, senior product manager at British mobile phone network provider Orange, agreed. She said with increased call revenue, such services could make up 50 percent of Orange's business in the near future.
"The voice portal will be the first thing you will use. What's the simplest thing to do? People are on the move. The voice portal will access everything for you -- the Web, travel timetables, news," she said.
But she said the field was in its infancy, and effective and easy ordering of flights or train tickers was probably a year or two away.
"Voice recognition is word-spotting at the moment," she said. She said natural language recognition would make these services fly, and that was not going to be available within the next year.
Other companies leading this field, Ridsdale said, were Omnitel 2000 in Italy and Webly of Chicago.>>> |
