Personal computing has exploded in the last few years. With computers getting cheaper by the minute, the number of people who own a computer increases every day. As these people go online, they fuel the e-commerce revolution - which could grow to represent as much as $400 billion's worth of goods and services by 2002, according to IDC Research. But what of the large part of the population who can’t even program their VCR? For those people, the idea of buying the right computer, figuring out how to use it and dealing with the ups and downs of computer use is too intimidating, leaving e-commerce as something they read about rather than experience. This is as much a disadvantage to businesses as it is for customers. From a company's point of view, self-service reduces costs by encouraging customers to use automated systems for common inquiries rather than taking up the expensive time of a live representative. In addition, by carefully logging and tracking these self-serve transactions, companies can capture information to customize their service to fit the needs of individual customers, increasing the likelihood that they will buy again. If non-computer savvy customers are picking up the phone to talk to a live operator instead of logging on to the Internet, they are costing more to serve with little if any advantage in the quality of the service. Yet most of these people ‘use’ computers every day, they just don’t know it. For example, many new cars no longer have a direct connection between the throttle and the engine. Instead the ‘gas pedal’ is connected to a computer that interprets signals from the pedal and adjusts a number of parameters - fuel flow, ignition timing, gear selection - to make the car respond in the most efficient manner. So every time the driver pulls away from a stop, they are ‘using’ a computer; however, unlike a personal computer, it’s one that requires no new skills or knowledge to operate. A collection of technology software, infrastructure and service companies are now working together to make the technology behind e-commerce transactions just as invisible to the end user as an engine management system is to the driver of a car. Last October, they announced the formation of the V-Commerce Alliance, a collection of companies working to provide compatible solutions that support self-service transactions using natural voice commands. The result - electronic commerce that is voice rather than text-based - makes e-commerce as easy as talking on the phone. There are many pieces within the Alliance that make ‘v-commerce’ possible. Two of the most significant contributions come in the form of natural-speech recognition technology from Nuance Communications and Motorola’s VoxML Voice Markup Language, a programming language that allows existing web content to be accessed by speech interfaces. Together, these two innovations allow organizations to leverage their existing investment in websites and allow them to be accessed by a technology available to over 900 million people - the telephone.
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