henry@garp.mit.edu (Henry Mensch) (09/13/89)
Pinched from the <New York Times> without permission: A Dallas-based company has developed an electronic operator system that allows people to make collect calls and calls billed to a third party from pay telephones without a human operator. The company, Intellicall Inc., which makes pay phones for private ownership, says its computerized operator system will reduce the need for human operators and save consumers 5 percent to 7 percent on operator-assisted calls made from pay phones. Intellicall's electronic operator, called Intellistar, uses voice synthesis and recognition technology. The regional Bell phone companies have also begun testing automated-operator systems, but the Intellicall system differs from those in that a microprocessor, or "brain," is in each pay telephone and not in the central office switch. Intellicall says its arrangement is less expensive for processing a call than that at the Bell companies. To make a collect call, the caller dials the number of the party to be billed and the computer asks the caller to give his or her name and records it. The system makes the call, plays back the name of the caller and asks whether the charges will be accepted. The system listens for a yes or no, and processes the call accordingly. Industry analysts expect the computerized system to bring Intellicall a significant share of the $2 billion pay-phone market, in which the government began allowing companies to compete for operator-assisted calls made from the nation's 1.6 million pay telephones this year. The American Telephone and Telegraph Co. had previously held a monopoly. Stephen Polley, Intellicall's chief executive, said pay phone owners who use the Intellistar system would reap commissions 10 percent higher than those offered by other alternative-operator service companies. Polley said the company has shipped more than 36,000 electronic operator systems since the product went on the market last year. The company is also putting the improvement into the more than 80,000 pay phones it has already installed. # Henry Mensch / <henry@garp.mit.edu> / E40-379 MIT, Cambridge, MA # <hmensch@uk.ac.nsfnet-relay> / <henry@tts.lth.se> / <mensch@munnari.oz.au> [Moderator's Note: I can see some definite disadvantages to these devices when cheats use them to relay messages for free: User dials call indicating it is collect. Phone says,"Record your name" and user says, "Meet me at the airport at 7 PM". Phone places call, and announces to recipient, "I have a collect call from (pause, tape kicks in) 'Meet me at the airport at 7 PM'; press one to accept the call, or two to decline." Naturally the recipient declines to accept the call, the phone says thank you and then disconnects. No charge to caller or callee, but a message has been given, and for less effort than is used now to send a coded message past the operator. The owner of the phone still gets stuck for the cost of the one minute station dialed call. At least the live, human operator would never tolerate this. You might be able to sneak past a coded message, but never could you be so brazen as to deliver an uncoded message under the pretense that it is your name for collect call authorization purposes. The AT&T operator would not accept your statement that 'meet me at the airport' was your name. And with the traditional payphones, the central could keep track of repeated game-playing of this nature from one particular group of phones. But if the private pay phone just has a little chip inside which records whatever you say, and records over it with the next person, a month after the fact the owner of the phone (or the maintainence company) gets a bunch of one minute calls and never knew what hit them. Too much opportunity for fraud here. PT]