The Pitfalls
It’s not all sunshine and lollipops in speech recognition land. While vendors have climbed the technical molehills, the mountains remain. The software’s interpretation capabilities while improved are still far from perfect. Throw in the background noise typical to an office and you’ve got yourself a virtual Tower of Babel. But even if vendors compensate for background noise—not to mention the millions of Americans with accents or speech impediments—it still won’t guarantee a speechy future.

Why? Plenty of reasons: It’s too much work. Not only will voice-enabled Internet require more bandwidth than companies have today, but the IT staff will have to customize the dictation application before rolling it out to employees—who you can be sure won’t know how to teach it company-specific jargon. Time equals money, and this will take a lot of time.

Our brains can’t handle a voice-enabled Web. Phone numbers are only seven digits long because that is the maximum amount of information we can store in our short-term memory. Try remembering which of the 8,000 links Yahoo just dictated that you want to follow.

Nobody cares anyway. People will quickly realize it’s easier to read e-mail on their wireless devices than listen to a computer drone over the phone.

The Prediction
Someone will eventually work out the kinks and offer a quality speech recognition product that has realistic applications, but there’s no need to jump on the bandwagon until you’re sure the wheels won’t come off.

-Ben Worthen

E-Marketplaces

The Trendline
Every few months a new world-changing technology occupies the tip of everyone’s tongue. Now intranets, B2B and XML have cleared a seat at the table for e-marketplaces. This latest e-commerce fad is like eBay on steroids.

E-marketplaces match companies with something to sell with companies looking to buy—through an auction, reverse-auction or exchange. But while e-marketplaces promise lower prices, the savings come at the expense of established business relationships—you buy from whomever’s cheapest, not who you know and trust. For companies just looking to save money, however, from whom they save it may not matter.

The Promise
In a perfect world, e-marketplaces could offer a utopian cybersociety freed from the chains of geography, where companies, motivated only by price, trade without prejudice. A company desperate for an obscure chemical compound might have to pay a fortune to a known trading partner, but through an e-marketplace such as Chemdex, it might find a supplier with a surplus who’s happy to sell for far less.

Too good to be true? E-marketplaces have plenty of believers. Forrester Research, for instance, projects that 53 percent of B2B e-commerce will travel through e-marketplaces by 2004—an estimated $1.4 trillion.