Voice browsing

Abstract

The Web provides universal access to information of staggering quantity and diversity. The universality results from the choice of a single means for representing information (HTML) and a single means for delivering it (HTTP). The end-user value produced by this choice is unrivaled in the history of data communications. As great as it is today, the Web's value continues to increase as the number of suppliers and consumers of information increases (Metcalfe's law). No new technology is needed to sustain this growth, except at the transport level, where bandwidth must increase to meet our user demand. What important limitations does the Web have that new technology could remove? One limitation involves access. While the Web (thanks to the geographical reach of the Internet beneath it) has many points of access, it supports just one type of access: visual, from a PC. As our reliance on the Web increases, so does our need to access it. Especially valuable and natural, would be voice access from a phone, especially a mobile phone. The next five years (2000-2005) will see the widespread deployment of voice browsers: digital personae who converse with their users by phone, retrieve Web information (for example, flight schedules) at their user's request, and carry out transactions (for example, changing a travel itinerary) according to their user's instructions. While the most familiar visual browsers today are lightweight PC applications, voice browsers will run in 24/7 network operations centers with the required telephony hardware and speech recognition software.