AT&T Co’s AT&T Network Systems in Morristown, New Jersey wants to bring the benighted souls that still have rotary-dial telephones into the information age, and by combining bought-in technology with its own, it has introduced the AT&T Information Services Platform. The system is designed to make it possible for telephone companies to supply businesses with services that enable callers anywhere to talk with the firm’s computers to order goods or for banking transactions. Those with old phones will use speech recognition, but the system also supports interaction via touchtone phone or computer keyboard. All transaction calls, even spoken ones, use less expensive data links, and only person-to-company employee calls require voice-grade lines. The system consists of a family of software products running on an iAPX-86-based NCR Corp Unix workstations in network offices or work centres, and uses Frame Relay, Switched Multimegabit Data Service or Asynchronous Transfer Mode lines. An application consultant needs only a week of training to design and build customer-oriented applications, claims AT&T. Information-processing algorithms from AT&T Bell Laboratories and Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV in Belgium are combined with hardware and software that enables a single port to handle the full variety of advanced interactive speech technologies such as speech recognition, text-to-speech, CELP compression, facsimile and electronic mail traffic, from Linkon Corp of New York, and high-density voice and call information processing components from Dialogic Corp, Parsippani, New Jersey. The system conforms to the new Signal Computing System Architecture call processing open standard initiative introduced in March by Dialogic. The system is set for delivery in first quarter 1994; no prices given.
