USA Today Article
NEW YORK -- The days of dialing the phone with your
fingertip are numbered.
Cheap, powerful software -- developed by IBM, Microsoft,
Dragon Systems, Lernout & Hauspie, General Magic and
others -- is hitting the market, allowing people to talk to
their machines much as the crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey
spoke to the computer Hal.
Registry Magic is rolling out a "virtual operator" that
answers incoming calls and connects them to the
appropriate extension. No caller is ever put on hold. And
customers don't have to press buttons to navigate a menu.
Lucent Technologies and Moviefone are negotiating a deal
that will allow callers to navigate local movie-listing services
with their voice, instead of punching numbers on their
keypad, says Dan Furman, president of Lucent Speech
Solutions. Details of the agreement still are unclear.
Fonix is developing a voice-recognition application that will
allow radiologists to speak into a computer and generate
transcribed copies of their reports in 3 hours instead of
three days, spokesman Steven Hansen says.
Wireless phone carriers such as AT&T Wireless and Sprint
PCS recently introduced wireless handsets and services that
offer hands-free voice dialing. And software company
Wildfire Communications offers a "digital assistant" that
answers your phone with a human-sounding voice and
responds to messages.
The telecommunications speech-recognition market will
exceed $5 billion by 2001, up from $407 million in 1997,
says investment bank Commonwealth Associates, the main
financial backer of Registry Magic. Consultant Forrester
Research agrees the market is growing, but says it hasn't
evaluated the size of the market yet. "The market has
tremendous potential," Forrester analyst Don DePalma says.
Public acceptance of the technology is growing, just as the
prices of powerful PCs and software programs fall.
"It is going to be huge," says Registry Magic CEO Walt
Nawrocki, who headed up IBM's speech-recognition unit
before starting his own company.
Most calls are connected right away, although a few must be
referred to a person for assistance, says U.S. Biosystems CEO
Alex Moreno, whose environmental analysis company has a
Registry Magic system.
That will be increasingly common. The number of human
operators answering calls to directory assistance and
corporate switchboards already has fallen to about 160,000
in 1996, from 250,000 in 1983, Commonwealth says.
By Steve Rosenbush, USA TODAY
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