And Bell Atlantic Corp says it will deliver multimedia services to more than 1m homes by 1995 and more than 8m by 2000: it is seeking bids for switching and fibre-optic transmission equipment, saying that the move was a major expansion of its original plan to spend $15,000m over the next 10 years to make its phone networks and the cable networks of its proposed Tele-Communications Inc acquisition compatible for sending all kinds of speech, data and video traffic; it will also use Texas Instruments Inc’s speech recognition technology when it begins a trial in New Jersey later this month of services that will enable some 300 subscribers in Irvington to talk to their telephones rather than press buttons for using features such as return call, repeat call, call trace, tone block, and speed dialling; if the test is successful, the system will be used at about 350,000 homes in the Virginia area later next year.
