Voice-Enabled Services
4th-6th March 2002, Brussels
By Akif Jawaid, Senior Associate at Ariadne Capital

As you’re driving to work during a typically hectic Monday morning you decide to change the track that’s playing on your CD player, check your e-mail, pay your utility bills and call your 9:30 appointment to let them know you’ll be late…all without touching a single button or taking your eyes off the road. Welcome to a vision of the world that pervaded the annual IIR Voice-Enabled Services European Congress held in Brussels during the first week of March 2002.

Attended by representatives from the leading technology companies in the space including IBM, Comverse, Nuance, Scansoft, NMS, Cisco, Lucent and BeVocal, the conference gave participants a unique insight into emerging trends, promising new technologies and lessons learnt in the implementation of voice-enabled services. The sphere of influence of voice-enabled services is expanding beyond the traditional voice-portal sector (which has been sized by the Radicati Group at approximately $50Billion/year), which includes automated call centre management, corporate voice ‘personas’ and transaction/service management into the area of telematics (the incorporation of voice-enabled services in automobiles). Potential legislation in the coming years that may enforce hands-free communication devices has convinced many of the tremendous market opportunity in the telematics area and has also been the catalyst for interesting joint-venture projects between major car manufacturers and Telco players.

Overall the conference exuded a feeling of enthusiasm that voice-enabled services will play an integral part of our everyday lives in the near future. From authenticated voice-enabled transactions to hands-free communication within our cars, voice is the natural communication format choice and is predicted to play an ever-increasing role in the daily fabric of our social existence.


This conference was organised by IIR.
For more information, go to: www.iir-conferences.com