What Kinds of Companies are Using Speech Recognition?

United Airlines has several speech-recognition systems, including employee travel reservations , consumer flight information, up-to-the-minute reporting of lost baggage, and other applications for frequent flyers. American Airlines, AirTran Airways, and Continental Airlines also have speech-recognition systems for flight information.

Then there are companies, such as FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS), that use speech recognition to help people track packages. FedEx also uses a speech-recognition system to provide shipping cost estimates over the phone.

A number of companies in the financial services industry use speech-recognition systems both to provide information and to enable customers to conduct transactions. They include E*TRADE, Charles Schwab, Wachovia, Bank of America, and Fidelity Investments.

Text-to-speech (TTS) technology, which enables computers to read text to callers , is being used in conjunction with speech-recognition systems so that Yahoo! and America Online users can listen to their e-mail messages from any telephone. Other companies use TTS to provide consumers with a weather- band radio ”the ability to hear up-to-the-minute, local weather reports provided by the National Weather Service in all of the United States, adjacent coastal waters, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Pacific Territories ”being spoken by a computer.

For an entire new breed of companies, speech recognition is not a service enabler , but the service itself. Among them are voice portals ”the telephone equivalent of Web portals ”that provide information on weather, stocks, driving directions, movie listings, and much more. These include companies such as HeyAnita, Tellme, and BeVocal.

Finally, we can't forget the telephone companies that use speech-recognition technology, including AT&T, Sprint PCS, Verizon, and Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel). Each of these companies uses speech-recognition technology in a variety of ways, from simple call routing to providing information by way of voice portals.