"Imagine having your e-mails read out to you, carrying out an automated banking or stock trading transaction, inquiring weather forecasts and listening to traffic reports in a hands-free eyes-free manner while on the move, all via voice-activated services?"

Still not convinced? Over the telephone, speech recognition expands the way callers get information quickly and perform many types of everyday transactions by using their voice and an automated system. These technologies let users access and manage information and stored content from any website or database that is of interest to them, using their ‘own voice’ via conventional telephones or mobile phones.

In today’s competitive market place, businesses need to enhance their communications offerings and strive for differentiation. Touch-tone menus and other automated customer service applications could be counter-productive, as the caller has to ‘wait for the operator’, ‘press one for....’ or ‘listen to long menus’. Speech will allow companies to bring a natural flow of communication through an automated system right to their customers and deliver value through voice. Speech technology will make businesses stand out from the crowd, as they can extend their service offerings to anyone who has a phone.

That is why speech is a breakthrough technology. It is estimated that by the end of 2005, there will be 128 million speech-enabled users, with nearly 50 percent being considered as regular users. Customers and businesses will immediately understand the benefits of speech.

Several emerging standards are now driving the next-generation of speech services. VoiceXML and session initiation protocol (SIP) are having a great impact on the development of speech services. The voice extensible markup language (VoiceXML) describes an interaction between a caller and a server over the telephone. SIP—a call control protocol developed to assist in providing advanced telephony services like routing/load balancing and location services—is a leading industry standard likely to impact the speech market.

Even though acceptance of speech systems worldwide has gathered pace, certain questions still remain unanswered. Who will adopt this technology and at what price? Will the end user readily accept this?

In India, there has been limited activity in the ‘voice Web’ arena, which involves scientific computing and application design. Talent in India is available in abundance and as the awareness and demand for voice technology catches on, we will see a few companies springing up and providing these solutions. There are however, a few companies that have taken the initiative to tap the emerging potential and have developed their very own ready-to-deploy voice platforms and custom voice applications.

The ‘voice Web’ in the real sense is a merging of the telephone networks and the Internet. The consumer will be exposed to more and more speech applications, which will be developed and deployed in-house or outsourced to application service providers. These applications will initially be accessible one at a time and provide a particular set of services, as they will be running in isolation from other services or service providers.

Getting these isolated bits and pieces together will provide the caller with more flexibility, as they will be able to obtain more value during the course of a single phone call. With the ability to ‘jump to’, ‘browse’ or ‘access’ content or information in an uninterrupted manner, enterprises will automatically be able to reach out to a larger audience. Imagine, after checking the availability of a book with a particular seller, a buyer can immediately arrange for its pick-up through a courier company.

With the evolution of ‘voice Web’, it will not be long before the caller will be able to enjoy unlimited and uninterrupted access to a virtually infinite quantum of content via voice.

Prashant Lamba director and co-founder Phonologies India