TELEPHONY VOICE USER INTERFACE CONFERENCE REVEALED THAT "THE FUTURE IS NOW" FOR SPEECH TECHNOLOGY --- Speech recognition has already handled tens of millions of calls in 1999

Tarzana, CA, February 23, 2000... At the recently concluded second annual "Telephony Voice User Interface Conference" in Scottsdale, AZ, numerous companies discussed their implementations of speech technology for call center applications. For example, Charles Schwab & Co. said that its automated stock quote and trading system handled 17 million calls in 1999. BellSouth Intelliventures described the company's deployment in Atlanta of a free voice-interactive information service and business guide, a voice portal providing information, among other things, on 8,000 area restaurants. GE Appliances described a successful business-to-business application where retail outlets could check product availability and price by phone. These applications of speech technology, and others discussed at the Conference, led attendees to conclude that "Speech Technology is ready for prime time!"

The Conference Doubled In Size...

"The Second Annual Telephony Voice User Interface Conference was about double the size of last year's Conference," reports Dr. William Meisel, president of TMA Associates, editor of Speech Recognition Update newsletter, and organizer of the Conference. "Last year speech recognition was a technology whose time was near. This year, speech recognition is a technology whose time is here."

The message was echoed by the nine sponsors of this year's Conference -- IBM, Lernout & Hauspie, Lucent, Locus Dialogue, Motorola, Nuance Communications, Philips, SpeechWorks and Unisys, as well as the 76 speakers.

The Future Is Now...

Speakers at the Conference pointed to a number of trends for the coming year:
· Speech recognition will grow rapidly in call centers. It pays for itself in 6-18 months.
· Voice Web technology will allow users to gain many of the benefits of the World Wide Web from any telephone.
· Voice Portals will proliferate, allowing callers access to a number of voice-activated services from any phone.
· Companies are beginning to offer Voice Hosting services, allowing other companies to offer voice-interactive services quickly and with a minimum of capital expenditure.
· E-commerce will include automated telephone access through the telephony voice user interface.
· Better application development tools will become available, further speeding the introduction of voice-activated services through the telephone.
· Both corporate and venture capital investment in speech technology is rapidly increasing.

"Speech recognition and speech synthesis have reached the level of performance and cost that supports a revolution in the telephone's user interface," Meisel notes. "Industry and investors have recognized the opportunity created and are acting upon it."

About William Meisel...

William S. Meisel, Ph.D., president of TMA Associates (www.tmaa.com), 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 over 20 years of experience in speech recognition, including founding and running a speech-recognition company for ten years. He is also Executive Director of the Applied Voice Input/Output Society, a non-profit 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.

Please direct all editorial inquiries and requests for interviews to David Kaye at KPR, Inc. Phone: 818/368-8212 or E-mail: dave@kprinc.com.

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