But I think I'll wait for a voice-activated system. I never liked typing. There you have it. The average American consumer has spoken. She wants it easy, and she wants it on her own terms.
Speech recognition is a powerful tool, and it's ready for prime time.
In the next generation of automated services, customers will talk with machines, expressing what they want in spoken natural language. This is a major improvement over the current generation of voice interfaces, where users must speak a small set of words in some fixed order. The service makes it possible for customers seeking operator assistance to talk to a machine that has a very sophisticated ability to understand what the customer is asking for. According to Gorin, ten customers could call in asking for the same assistance but pose the question in ten different ways. So the program has to be able to respond to customer requests, no matter how they are phrased.