An Accidental Manager by Roger Collis

Author:Roger Collis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: eBookPartnership.com
Published: 2013-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

A Friendly Voice on the Road

1998 International Herald Tribune

Road warriors of the millennium are slaves to progress. In-flight phones and faxes, laptop computers that pack the punch of desk-top PCs, e-mail, voice-mail and the new generation of digital mobiles enable (and compel) you to catch up with office work and keep in touch with anyone anywhere in the world at any time; and, more ominously, for anyone to keep in touch with you. There’s no excuse these days for not being totally wired at all times.

Stunning advances in speech-recognition technology now allow travelers to dictate documents, such as faxes and e-mail into a laptop computer at twice the speed of the average professional typist and to have e-mail and fax messages read back to them. All you need is a microphone/speaker and some inexpensive software. Should you find yourself without your laptop, or a friendly neighborhood PC, you can do much the same thing from any touch-tone phone. You just call a personal 800 number from anywhere in the world to have e-mail, faxes, or travel information, such as airline schedules, read to you with voice or touch-tone key commands. You can respond to, say, a fax, with an e-mail or voice-mail message, or edit and redistribute faxes and voice messages as e-mail

Talking to a computer, either direct or on the phone, is the ultimate user-friendly interface with your personal cybernetic secretary. No need to type or click with a mouse, just speak to your PC to open files, send e-mail, format text or surf the net. Premiere Technologies Inc. in Atlanta offers a product called Orchestrate that allows you to receive and redirect messages between one medium and another through a laptop via the Internet or by telephone. You sign up for an e-mail address – your own home page – with a 10-digit access number and 4-digit PIN on the Orchestrate Web site at www.orchestrate.net plus an 800 number that you can call from anywhere in the world to do much the same thing via voice prompts. Steve Walden, vice president for Internet strategy at Premiere Technologies, says: ‘Your personal 800 number virtually makes the telephone and the computer interchangeable, so as long as you have access to the Internet, you can go to your personal Web page and check your voice-mail, your e-mail and faxes either through the screen or by voice through the telephone.

‘But let’s say I just have a phone – I’m changing planes in London. You dial your personal 800 number and a voice says, “Good afternoon, Roger. Would you like to hear your messages?” It will play your voice-mail, read your e-mail or faxes and then it will give you options, through a series of voice-prompts, to which you respond by hitting numbers on the telephone key-pad, such as, Do you want to forward this? Do you want to respond to this? The voice will take you down a decision-tree: You have six e-mails, two voice messages, 12 faxes, which would you like to listen to? You can decide what messages you want to listen to, store for later or delete.

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