Talking Email

THE CHALLENGE

If you are a typical business traveler, you rely on email as one of several key messaging tools. But using email when you are out of the office or away from a hotel room can be complicated. First, you need a portable computer or laptop - an expensive investment for many small businesses. Second, you need to find a pay phone with a modem, or a phone jack with an analog line. Third, you have to download your messages.

What you really want is a national number that lets you listen to your messages. You want to be able to scan or read the text of a given message, or scan or read the header information of all your messages. You want to be able to review your email in-box so you can focus your attention on urgent messages, or messages of interest from a particular person, or messages on a specific subject.

THE SOLUTION

Premiere Technologies, an international long distance provider, has such an email service. Premiere initially offered the service to their seven million WorldLink subscribers, but it proved so popular with business travelers that CompuServe and Mail Boxes Etc. partnered with Premiere to offer these same services to their subscriber base of an additional six million customers.

Premiere uses the TruVoice™ email preprocessor and text-to-speech (TTS) engine from Lernout & Hauspie (Burlington, MA), a supplier of advanced text-to-speech technologies. Premiere's decision to standardize the WorldLink platform ; platform enables them to expand the number of ports in their system by simply adding more Antares cards. This has given them the flexibility to quickly add major accounts like CompuServe to their customer base without re-designing WorldLink or adversely affecting the quality of their services.

Should Premiere decide to offer additional features, such as voice-enabled control of the subscriber's services via automatic speech recognition, all they need to do is add Antares cards with ASR technologies.