July 2000

BY CAROL DRZEWIANOWSKI

Well, even if I don't have a PC nearby, chances are I still have a regular old telephone. And with the hubub about speech portals lately, I know that I can get access to just about any information I need, as long as I have dialtone.

The Kelsey Group, a leading e-commerce, voice, and Web technology analyst firm, expects that 18 million consumers will use some kind of speech recognition portal by 2005. With Internet-based e-commerce sales increasing every year, emerging companies are seeing the many benefits of extending their corporate information and e-commerce transactions to anyone with a phone. As efforts increase to reach the burgeoning wireless audience, The Kelsey Group believes that advertising revenues will reach $17 billion in 2005, with local advertisers alone accounting for about $6 billion.

Lycos has teamed up with Quack.com to develop a voice-driven Web portal. The free service will allow users to surf the Web using the spoken word from any phone, thanks to a toll-free number. This service is not positioned merely for Web users on the go; it also plans to promote the service to non-Internet users so they can more rapidly access the information they deem most relevant.

Natural MicroSystems is also jumping in the portal pool. They have announced HearSay, an integrated, extensible product designed to drive the rapid development and deployment voice voice-driven Web commerce. And Intel and its Dialogic subsidiary are adding continuous speech processing technology to its Dialogic family of voice processing products that support speech-based Web access. This technology, developed in conjunction with leading speech companies, allows developers to build speech recognition applications, such as voice portals, at a lower cost using a single-board solution.

So what makes a speech portal different from a cell-phone service that deliver Web content? Some 600 million mobile phones will be in use by 2001, say IDC market researchers. Many of those phones will be able to access Web content. Well, believe it or not, not everyone owns a mobile phone, much less a Web-enabled mobile phone right now. (And as we all know, wireless phones go in and out of service areas, causing disconnections, or no signal at all). Under these circumstances, speech portals are ideal solutions for quick, reliable access to information.

It will be interesting to see what happens with speech portals over the next few months, but for now you can read about the latest announcements from some of the leading vendors.

BY BILL WOLFE

One-billion-plus a day. That's the consensus estimate of the combined volume of e-mail and voice mail messaging traffic in the U.S. these days. As inexorable changes in business continue, the traffic will only increase.

In fact, the more active and mobile the user, the greater the need to keep in touch, whether by voice mail, e-mail, fax, or other advanced calling services. Their needs help drive the long-awaited advent of unified messaging -- a crucial emerging service offering enabled by speech recognition that is projected as one of the fastest growing "convergent" applications (expected to grow to $12 billion in market size in 2006, according to Dataquest).

Service providers are driven to creating a more personalized, long lasting relationship with their customers providing a user friendly unified messaging solution as a key way of adding profitable revenue to basic dial tone.

The rapid growth of Internet applications and mobile users has created the requirement for a next generation of solutions that combine voice and Internet applications -- "unified communications." A unified communications solution is a combination of real-time and message-based solutions for both inbound and outbound communications based on an open, IP architecture and offering a broad range of converged services including voice, video, and data.

Using a simple, single account, subscribers can access their e-mail, voice mail, and fax messages through a standard PC Internet message client, an Internet browser or telephone -- regardless of location. They can create voice messages using the telephone and send them to any other subscriber on the service. They can respond to or forward existing e-mail messages with voice annotations from any standard telephone.

REAL - TIME COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES
Building upon the IP-based messaging platform and the IP network infrastructure, a unified communications platform lets subscribers take advantage of a range of real-time communications services that improve access to information and communications while providing complete control over information delivery time and priority. These include:

• Call management and "follow-me" roaming capabilities, which use speech recognition to identify and screen inbound calls.
• Enterprise application integration, to provide a voice interface to applications such as customer relationship management, order entry, customer databases, inventory management, and others.
• WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) message management, to enable mobile subscribers to prioritize and route e-mails, voice mail, and fax messages.
• Voice-enabled Web servers, to create an integrated customer experience.
• On-demand conferencing, to improve the productivity of distributed workgroups.

SCALABILITY
A unified communications solutions' IP-based architecture can scale upwards at the network layer or the application layer. At the network layer, standard network design engineering methods add capacity in the IP cloud. Installing more voice or RAS (remote access server) boards in gateway devices, or adding access servers at the point of presence, can boost POP capacity. Application and message processing scalability is a matter of increasing the number of servers. To add more directory capacity (to store more subscriber profiles), simply add more directory servers and use the directory vendor's partitioning or scaling features to maximize performance. To add more message store capacity, add more message disk drives.

Speech recognition will empower sophisticated network applications with a highly natural and truly intuitive interface -- replacing rigid touch-tone menus. But that interface must be built on a platform that's flexible, open, cost-effective, and scalable.

Bill Wolfe is the general manager of Cisco Systems' Unified Communications Business Unit, based in Richmond, Virgina. For more information, please visit www.cisco.com. 

[ return to the top ]
[ return to the July 2000 table of contents ]

BY LEAH LESSER

W ho hasn't been stuck in traffic, left only to wonder if the flight you're desperately trying to make will be on time, or wondering where the latest stock du jour closed, only to be left wondering because your teenager is glued to the family computer? None of us are tethered to a computer all of the time, and incidents like these are inevitable. But with the recent advent of speech portals, consumers have untethered, anytime, anywhere access to popular Internet information. Speech portals offer consumer news and information that anyone can navigate and access from any phone, using speech recognition technology.

The increasing popularity of speech portals is obvious when you examine the evidence:

• There are over 1.7 billion phones in the world.
• 90 percent of households in the Western hemisphere own phones.
• The Gartner Group measures the rate of wireless phone adoption as three times the rate of new Internet subscribers.
• Consumers' expectations for instant information are already established by the Web.

WHY NOW?
But, why is it now that speech portals are coming to market? Thanks to great technological and user interface advances in telephony-based speech recognition, speech portals are as easy to use as speaking into any phone. One of the great advantages to speech portals versus getting Web content on devices that have tiny screens, such as Internet-enabled cell phones, is sheer convenience. "I would much rather talk into a phone to receive information I can listen to rather than have to squint at a screen I can hardly see and try to finagle my way into navigating around tiny content," said one user at a recent speech portal focus group.

Not to mention when consumers are walking down the street, sitting in their cars or otherwise multi-tasking, navigating screens becomes a very dangerous proposition. This is where the power of speech recognition comes in very handy.

FREE SPEECH FOR THE CONSUMER
Speech portals are following in the historical footsteps of the Web. Just as Web sites offer free content and generate revenue from advertising, many of the speech portals offer free services that are subsidized with interactive, speech-based ads. These ads are permissive, relevant 5-8 second audio files consumers hear when interacting with a speech portal. For example, a caller to a restaurant service who just made a dinner reservation might hear, "Would you like to see a movie near that restaurant?" The caller could then say, "Skip it" or "Tell me more." If the caller responds "Tell me more," an extended speech ad plays offering a new set of interactive options to the caller.

In a recent focus group led by a company deploying a speech service to complement its online offerings, all participants preferred hearing an ad to paying a service fee for using the system. Not only do these ads help make the service free for consumers, they also help companies reach and capture a new, larger audience -- anyone with access to a telephone.

So, next time you find yourself untethered, pick up any phone, use your voice, and get your answers -- it's as simple as that!

Leah Lesser is marketing manager for SpeechWorks International, Inc. For more information, visit the company's Web site at speechworks.com.

[ return to the top ]
[ return to the July 2000 table of contents ]