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Technology Stocks : Registry Magic Systems- "RMAG" Voice Recognition -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scrapps who wrote (90)	2/15/2000 8:57:00 AM
From: John Madarasz	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 118

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 ragingbull.com