IBM Corp has enhanced its DirectTalk speech processing system and reckons that banks, hospitals, utilities, state and local governments and many other groups can now be far more creative in how they get information by phone to people that need it, whether they are customers, patients, the general public, or their own employees: part of IBM’s CallPath family of products, the system gives callers access, via the telephone keypad, to a broad variety of information typically stored in computers, DirectTalk runs on OS/2- or Unix-based computers, and IBM has opened it up so it runs on a large number of personal computers and is not restricted to one specific machine; a new text-to-speech feature, which converts stored computer information into synthesised speech, enables the system to talk back to callers, and the new release can respond to as many as 24 incoming calls simultaneously, up from 16, and two or more systems on a local network can act as clients and share a single server database; the new release will be available on December 4 and ain’t cheap – it costs from $17,140 for a four-line system to $51,000 for a 24-line.
