Standard Wireless Phones Will Compete With Internet-Phones; Competition From Over-the-Telephone Speech Recognition Has Been Largely Ignored - TMA Associates Pres William Meisel on the outlook for Internet-enabled wireless phones - Industry Trend or Event

Cambridge Telcom Report, Dec 6, 1999

In the rush to introduce "Internet-enabled" wireless phones and productivity devices, vendors may find the market growing much more slowly than intended, according to William Meisel, president of TMA Associates, a speech industry consulting firm, and editor of Speech Recognition Update newsletter.

"Services that use speech recognition in a central location can be used by any existing telephone, converting it into a personal assistant. Customers can keep their small phones and long battery life, and still have the same features that specialized phones offer," Meisel noted.

Telephone speech recognition lets callers phone a central location for general information such as stock quotes, news or sports scores. Personalized information, such as e-mail, appointments and contact information, can also be reached by the same number, with updating of personal information synchronized with PCs over the Internet.

With an increasing number of companies creating telephone equivalents to their e-commerce sites using telephone speech recognition, callers can even go shopping by phone.

Meisel noted that there are a number of advantages to centralizing the information resources:

1. Callers need not buy a specialized phone that is overly large, has a shorter battery life, and will become obsolete when new innovations are introduced. They can pick any wireless phone, since telephone speech recognition operates on equipment at the location called. The phone will automatically receive all the services at any location called as they are updated.

2. Any speech-recognition-enabled service can be reached by the phone. If one's stock brokerage has a voice-enabled service (as companies such as Charles Schwab and E*Trade do), the caller just calls the appropriate toll-free number. The service called need not have an equivalent service tailored to the caller's specific device protocol.

3. Any phone can be used. If the caller does not have his wireless phone, he can use a pay phone or any other available telephone to get the same services.

"Speech recognition provides a new user interface for any telephone," Meisel said. He is holding his second annual "Telephony Voice User Interface Conference" on Feb. 2-4, 2000, in Scottsdale, Ariz., to give the industry a forum for detailing progress in this breakthrough area.

The conference will bring together the world's leading managers, experts, customers and investors in speech recognition and computer telephony, to explore the impact of speech recognition on telephony and its markets.

The wide sponsorship of this conference -- IBM, Lernout & Hauspie, Lucent, Locus Dialogue, Nuance Communications, Motorola, Philips, SpeechWorks and Unisys -- underscores the importance of this important change in the telephone user interface. Further information about the conference can be found at www.tmaa.com or by calling 910/452-0047. TMA Associates is in Tarzana at 818/708-0962.

William S. Meisel, Ph.D., president of TMA Associates, a consulting and publishing firm, is one of the speech technology industry's best-known independent analysts and consultants. He is the publisher and editor of Speech Recognition Update newsletter and the author of influential speech-recognition market studies. Meisel has more than 20 years of experience in speech recognition, including founding and running a speech-recognition company for 10 years. He is also executive director of the American Voice Input/Output Society, a nonprofit organization.

Meisel obtained his B.S. degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California.