October 4, 1999

Easy Voice Mail

Lucent software offers affordable speech-activated voice-mail systems

By Brian Riggs

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ucent Technologies Inc. last week introduced speech-recognition software for voice-messaging systems that lets callers reach telephone extensions by simply speaking a name.

Lucent Voice Director is intended to simplify mobile users' ability to navigate business voice-messaging systems. "Dialing someone's name with a keypad or looking up their extension can be very cumbersome to mobile users," says Blake Baxter, a Lucent product line manager.

By speaking the name of anyone in the voice-mail directory, a caller can have the system dial that extension or address and send recorded messages. Messages to multiple recipients can be created by speaking each of their names.

Voice Director runs as an application on Lucent's Intuity Audix voice-messaging platform, with processor-intensive voice-recognition functions off-loaded to a standalone Windows NT server. Callers can speak the names of employees listed in the Intuity voice-mail directory, as well as in the directories of other Lucent voice systems. Directory changes to the voice-mail systems are automatically recognized by the voice-recognition software. Voice Director can recognize up to 20,000 names.

Technology that lets voice-mail systems support voice commands has existed for a number of years, but has not been deemed cost-effective enough to interest many companies. Such software can cost tens of thousands of dollars, says Bill Meisel, president of the consulting firm TMA Associates. By only recognizing voice prompts for names stored in the employee names directory, Lucent was able to produce a lower-cost product, he says.

Now shipping, Voice Director is priced at $3,000 for software that supports two channels and up to 5,000 names. One channel can handle one speech-recognition attempt at a time. Additional channels and names are priced at $3,000 per additional channel and 5,000 additional names.

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