AUGMENTING YOUR DESKTOP WITH TELECOM PHONES AND PCs START TO MERGE Are you sick of automated voices telling you what to do? Replace that tired old instrument on your desk, and its 27 accumulated voice messages, with a piece of computerized telecommunications gear-- and kick the clutter.
(FORTUNE Magazine) – THE PHONE is ringing as you hurry back into your office after a day on the road. But before you make it across the room, the big answering machine in the sky picks up the call. The floor is a swamp of information. Pages of trivial faxes lap against the legs of your desk, hiding that fax you were expecting with details of a zillion-dollar order. If you can traverse their slippery surfaces without breaking your neck, and turn on your PC, you'll find 12 screenfuls of E-mail messages that have arrived via the office network. Enough, you say? Look at your telephone and see the message light. The horror. "Hello. This is your voice-mail system. You have ... 27 ... messages. Please dial 6 to receive them.'' You don't know where they came from or how long they will last. You must sit and listen to them all. As you begin, the phone rings again. It's someone who wants to know your fax number. Go back to the messages. Silence. What button to push to rewind them? To fast-forward them? To make them all go away? Start again ... Office communication networks have grown brainier over the years, but to the pitiable user the intelligence is often invisible. Somehow the Ameche, as the phone was once known in gangster argot (after Don, who played Alexander Graham Bell in the movies), has become an instrument of torture. Therein lies a need that is turning the desktop into a high-tech battleground. Competing alliances of companies -- Novell, AT&T, Intel, and Microsoft among them -- are pushing different ways to combine office telephone and computer systems. If the marriage works, it will end the awkward mess of two networks that live together but can't really talk. After years of blissless servitude to labor-saving devices, office workers are starting to get tools that let them control electronic communications simply and efficiently. Using the PC screen as a kind of universal mailbox, they are gaining access to voice mail, E-mail, and faxes, all at the click of a mouse button. New technology is also letting people swap images and documents on their screens while they talk on the phone. And not a decade too soon. Managing the flow of information is becoming ever more important as businesses try to save money. They are cutting down on staff and asking executives to rely instead on the electronic gear the company has been shelling out for. As computers take care of more central-office tasks -- underwriting in the insurance business, for example -- and eliminate desk jobs, a growing share of workers must spend at least part of their time in the field. They don't travel with secretaries, but they do take along laptop computers and cellular phones. Their employers expect them to perform on the road as if they were in the office, and to perform in the office as if they were never away. UNITING computers and telephones will help cure the phone's most vexing shortcomings. Especially for retrieving messages and entering data, the touch- tone keypad is pathetically inadequate. Harry Newton, an ebulliently hyperbolic Briton who edits the trade journal Computer Telephony and is self- appointed cheerleader for computer-based communication technologies, says, "I can burble on for hours about this. The voice-mail interface stinks. If you make a mistake when you're dialing a long number, you can't even do a backspace; you have to start from scratch.'' The numbers to push for < performing various tasks are entirely arbitrary and vary from system to system. Hence, they are beyond most people's endurance to learn. The universal mailbox makes sense of the hash by adding the intuitive logic of the graphical user interface, the simple, picture-oriented system for controlling personal computers popularized by Apple and also familiar to users of Microsoft Windows. Special communications software from a number of little companies, such as Applied Voice Technology of Kirkland, Washington, and Active Voice of Seattle, creates a message screen that pops up when you turn on your PC. The screen displays one line of information about each message: its type -- say, voice or fax; its length in pages for faxes or in minutes for voice messages; the phone number of the sender; even the sender's name, if you have it in your computer files. The emphasis is on ease of use. To hear a particular voice message, you choose it from the list with your mouse and then click on an icon that looks like a phone. Your telephone will ring and deliver the message. (In some systems, the sound might come over the PC's speaker.) If you want to stop in midstream and hear a different message or send E-mail to a colleague, you can return to the first message later and it will resume where you left off. You can pause, back up, or fast-forward by clicking on on-screen buttons that resemble the controls of a tape recorder. The computer doesn't merely control voice messages: By translating them into digital form, it makes them as easy as E-mail to manipulate and store. You can file a voice message for future reference just by dragging its icon along the screen and dropping it into the right folder. You can send a copy to a co- worker by clicking on his or her extension number, and even append an E- mail note that your colleague can read on-screen while listening to the message. The marriage of computers and telephones will help people get information wherever they are and share it with one another. This spirit of collaboration is reflected in the companionable name of a class of software called groupware. Computer users in different locations will be able to send images and files to each other as they converse on the phone, even via ordinary phone lines before the information highway arrives. In fact, this kind of document sharing seems set to upstage videoconferencing as the quintessence of futuristic collaboration, at least in the short term. Though videoconferencing systems are getting cheaper, the images remain annoyingly herky-jerky because the telephone network can't yet handle the huge flow of data necessary for clear, full-motion video. In the meantime, as telecommunications consultant Jim Burton of CT-Link in Weston, Massachusetts, says, "It's not necessary for me to see you for us to work together, but it would be nice to be able to send you a slide.'' Imaginative applications of document sharing are beginning to push their shoots above the ground. Radish Communications Systems of Boulder, Colorado, has developed a software technology called VoiceView that will let you send a screenful of information to a colleague anywhere in the world during a phone call without having to use a second line. If you and your colleague have the same software, say Lotus 1-2-3, you can share data files. Many modem manufacturers have licensed Radish's technology, and chips that incorporate the program will soon be built into their products. (To find out about Radish, see "FORTUNE Checks Out 25 Cool Companies.") And what if long-distance collaborators are using incompatible computers or programs? Software is on the way from General Magic in Mountain View, California, that will automatically translate the information into the format used by the recipient. The universal mailbox will make life easier for people on the road. Voice- synthesis software from Applied Voice Technology and other companies lets peripatetic employees call into the office network and have the system read them their E-mail aloud. The voices in such systems sound annoyingly cybernetic, but users can opt to have only the first few lines of each message read. The ne plus ultra of easy input will be software that can recognize speech with the facility of the human brain. It will probably be many years before such programs exist. But a few timesaving, albeit rudimentary, voice- recognition programs are already for sale. Jabra of San Diego makes one for use with a PC or personal communicator like the AT&T Eo. The program works with a tiny telephone-speaker- and-microphone combination, called an EarPhone, built by Norris Communications of nearby Powys. (For more about Norris, see "Cool Companies.") You wear the device in your ear; it picks up your voice from the vibration of bones in your head as you speak. Jabra's software, which runs on a high-end model of the Macintosh, lets you place a call simply by saying a name. The software will find the listing in the Mac's telephone directory and dial the number. The EarPhone Streamline model and software sell for $169. The race to merge computer and phone networks has ramifications far beyond the desktop: It is bringing ferocious computer-industry-style competition to the telecommunications business. "This industry is about to get turned on its side, from vertical to horizontal,'' says Howard Bubb, CEO of Dialogic, a maker of computer telephony products in Parsippany, New Jersey. To see what he's getting at, consider how the computer industry has changed. In the late 1970s, its markets were highly segmented: IBM sold mainframes, DEC sold computers for engineers, and Wang sold word processors. Then standards emerged -- for microprocessors, disk drives, networks, and operating software -- touching off a competitive free-for-all. Until now, telecommunications companies have made their own proprietary computer chips and mainframe switches, and have written their own software. But the process of standardization has begun and will move quickly. AH, BUT WHO will set the standard for physically linking phone and computer networks? Such a link, along with new communications software, will permit the computer network to intercept and understand the very different signals of telephones. One approach, pioneered by AT&T and Novell, the dominant maker of software that ties personal computers into networks, is to build a single high-capacity bridge that connects the corporate telephone switch and the PC network's main computer. Novell accomplishes this by hooking the two to a souped-up workstation, or server, loaded with communications software. Everyone in the office with a PC on the network will be able to place calls and retrieve voice mail through this central link. A rival scheme, championed by Microsoft and Intel, adds the option of building individual bridges in each worker's office. The phone plugs directly into the PC, where the communications software resides. Apple Computer is pushing a similar plan. The approaches are suited for slightly different markets. The AT&T-Novell plan is ideal for businesses with big computer networks, where many users will benefit from the expensive central bridge. The desktop-by-desktop alternative will appeal to companies with fewer workers to hook up; since the software lives on the PC, employees with portable computers will be able to use the program at home as well as in the office, simply by plugging a phone into their laptop. Each camp is now trying to convince writers of application software that its standards will dominate. Intel believes that computer telephony will stimulate demand for PCs that contain its most sophisticated chips. The company may also make an add-on circuit card that will let a PC accept signals coming from a telephone -- for lighting a message light, ringing a bell, or carrying the sound of a voice or a bit of data. Apple has designed similar circuits for its computers. Either scheme would give companies of all sizes a capability that till now only the largest customer-service operations could afford. For years, credit card companies, big insurers, and others have been able to order software that links their computer and phone networks. The software might, say, provide a customer agent with a screenful of account information the instant a call comes in. But until now the software has been custom-made and very expensive, costing about $1,500 to $2,000 per workstation. If a manager wanted to change the software, he or she would probably need the board of directors to sign the chit, so big would be the bill. Mass-produced to a common standard, the new software will be much cheaper. Novell's will cost as little as $70 per user for a system serving a few hundred; the server costs perhaps $4,000. Users will be able to add applications bought in computer stores or by mail to make their networks do just what they want. A company called Aristacom in Alameda, California, for example, offers conference-call software for $2,500 and up. It lets you set up calls in advance by typing in the phone numbers of all parties and the time of the call. At the appointed hour, the computer will dial the numbers and get everyone on the phone. AS WITH EVERY purported next great thing, the question comes to mind: Do we really need this? After all, some of the companies producing this marvelous new software are also responsible for those automated answering systems that make phoning many businesses an exercise in Jobian patience. And some of the stuff that will come on the market you wouldn't want for free. "I've seen people with pictures of a touch-tone keypad on the screen, and you dial by clicking on the numbers,'' says a Novell official. "Who's going to bother with that?'' But don't reject the good because of the imperfect. Connecting phone and PC networks may well make it easier for you to do your job better. And the universal mailbox could finally give you shelter from the blizzard of electronic messages coming your way. |
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