From...

June 14, 1999
Web posted at: 10:28 a.m. EDT (1428 GMT)

by Dorte Toft

BOSTON (IDG) -- Voice technology will make the phone take off as an interface to electronic commerce, according to several speakers at Tech Talk, a conference on speech technology that opened yesterday at the World Trade Center in Boston.

"Phones open the gate to e-commerce for all," said Gaston Bastiaens, president and CEO of Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products Inc. in Belgium, in his keynote speech.

Bastiaens later referred to market research showing that once PC penetration reaches about 50% of households, as in the U.S., Denmark and Sweden, the growth in PC penetration slows considerably.

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"If anybody wants to be the Wal-Mart of the Net, you have to offer phone access," he added.

Electronic commerce conducted by phone happens today. Online broker ETrade Securities Inc., for example, offers customers the ability to buy and sell securities from any phone. Speech recognition and text-to-speech technology from SpeechWorks International Inc. make the process as automatic as using the Web.

So far, e-commerce has been equated with Web-based commerce, but that isn't correct, according to Stuart Patterson, CEO at Boston-based SpeechWorks. "Speech commerce is the second leg of e-commerce," he said.

Automatic speech recognition and automatic text-to-speech are already healthy businesses. Increasing numbers of telecom companies offer speech-based directory searches and other services. According to market researcher TMA Associates inTarzana, Calif., telecommunications companies this year will license speech technology for $194 million. The billion dollar mark should be passed in 2002.

The growth in call centers also spurs revenue for speech companies. Call centers presently are costly in manpower, and customers are fed up reaching just voice-mail boxes or ending up in a queue when phoning in. Companies also employ speech technology at their switchboards.

Among the vendors are SpeechWorks, Nuance Communications in Menlo Park, Calif., and Phonetic Systems Inc. in Burlington, Mass.

The third realm of speech technology -- automatic translation between languages -- is just budding. But yesterday, Lernout & Hauspie demonstrated an almost real-time chat involving translation between an English speaker and a German speaker. There was a few seconds' delay in the process, which consisted of speech-to-text, text translation and text-to-speech.

"We hope to be ready with a system in a corporate environment by the end of this year," Bastiaens said.