David Gast <gast@cs.ucla.edu> (04/10/91)
Barton.Bruce@camb.com wrote: > Phone numbers are a crude temporary necessity they have imposed on us. > Wouldn't it be nice to simply speak into the phone and say 'my friend > Tony Jones's third office line please', and from the random pay phone be > voice recognised as you and thereby indicating which Tony Jones is > being refered to. Sometimes I am really amazed at the suggestions that are made to improve convenience. To some extent the above may be convenient. On the other hand, do we really want the phone company (and every COCOT sleeze since the example above includes a pay phone) or the government to recognize our voice on a routine basis? Our every move would be tracked. Additionally, this particular scenario has a huge security hole: I call someone, they record my voice, then they call someone, but pipe their input through a device that simulates my voice. Now they can easily represent themselves as me. Perhaps we should close some the existing security holes before we make new giant ones. David [Moderator's Note: And what, pray tell, is the difference between this and sending someone a written letter who then forges my handwriting and signs off on some fraudulent documents for me? Maybe we should stop allowing handwritten communication between people (or individuals and companies) before this 'existing security hole' gets worse. How inconvenient do you want things to be just to accomodate your fears about 'what might happen'? PAT]
zellich@stl-07sima.army.mil (Rich Zellich) (04/11/91)
> Wouldn't it be nice to simply speak into the phone and say 'my friend > Tony Jones's third office line please', and from the random pay phone > be voice recognised as you and thereby indicating which Tony Jones is > being refered to. Take a look at X.400 e-mail "addresses"; that's why all those fields are in there. The general idea is to allow future Directory-Service lookup on fields likely to be known to you (name, organization, country, etc.). There's no reason you can't do something similar with telephone "addresses". All you need is a black box with the requisite smarts, or a phone-board in your personal computer. It will require a fair amount of intelligence in the software to not only recognize spoken words, but also to parse them into something meaningful to the system's directory-search algorithm, but it's certainly doable (though perhaps very expensive) right now. If I can have an e-mail alias file with entries like "jff2" (an old NIC Ident) and "oscteam", then I can certainly do the same thing with a telephone-system alias file. Perhaps the future will even allow [inter]national directory lookup as well; my opinion is that it would be to the phone companies benefit to provide easy and *free* directory lookup in the interest of generating more per-call revenue. I don't know about "from any random pay phone", though. Perhaps when computing power gets a bit cheaper we'll be able to use something like a Casio BOSS with a voice-recognizer and a tone-generator built in, and use the hand-held device to do our dialing for us. Actually, we can do that now (but without the voice-input capability, of course), *very* cheaply with a shirt-pocket dialer with a name-number memory and a simple lcd-screen interface. [Moderator's Note: We have 'alias addresses' to a limited extent now with the speed-calling function offered by most telcos with an ESS office. A long distance carrier who also offers 'alias addresses' is Telecom USA. As part of their Calling Card service, when on their switch, *90 allows you to program up to nine (*91 through *99) 'speed numbers' when using their switch for your long distance calls. PAT]
casterli@lamar.colostate.edu (leroy Casterline) (04/17/91)
>> Wouldn't it be nice to simply speak into the phone and say 'my friend >> Tony Jones's third office line please'... While I was at Winter CES this year, I saw just such a product. Let's see, where did I put that spec sheet ... shuffle ... ah, here it is. Called the ORIGIN Voicephone from Origin Technology, Sunnyvale, CA. (408) 734-1021. Leroy Casterline