As for speech recognition, it's coming along, but slowly. As hands-free cell-phone use in automobiles becomes the law of the land, speech-recognition vendors are scrambling to provide hands-free solutions in an inhospitable environment where the random and systematic background noise inherent in your car's confined space is exacerbated by the audible nightmare that can be part of your cellular experience.

A number of automakers that had planned to introduce voice control in their high-end 2000-model-year cars are still waiting for the technology to catch up with the desire. Systems that hit the 95 percent recognition level while poking along at 30 mph sink to an unacceptable 70 percent when cruising at 70 mph over concrete expansion joints with the air conditioner running.

Rip and Replace Gives Ground

A few years back, the advantages of combining voicemail and e-mail into a single point of access were as obvious as they are today. The problem was that most solutions required enterprises to go through some radical changes. Combining the two technologies required a rip-and-replace mind-set for equipment -- and in some cases for personnel as well.

Proprietary architectures forced replacement of companies' voicemail systems, e-mail systems or both, and IT staffers either learned the new systems fast or were replaced. The fact that companies were willing to put themselves through this pain is testament to the value of a UM solution.

That value lies squarely in increased productivity, something that's hard to measure in dollars. This means that, while optimistic IT personnel may be able to find any number of creative ways to predict positive bottom-line results, the true monetary payoff for a UM implementation is hard to pin down.

It's always easier for the bean counters to demonstrate the negative bottom-line results produced by ripping out an expensive piece of equipment that isn't fully amortized. Couple this with the budgetary and political battles waged between the telecommunications and the IT camps, and you begin to understand why UM adoption has been slower than predicted.

How do the telecom folks enter the mix? In this age of digital convergence, voice is just another form of data, and voicemail is just another type of e-mail -- the IT camp has won this war. In truth, the outcome was never really in doubt.

Introducing the Internet into the fray has opened the way for another major player in the UM space. This player is not just one more UM product vendor but rather a plethora of providers in the ASP space. Webley Systems and CyberTel are prime examples of vendors pitching in to off-load the responsibility of UM from your company -- for a price. CyberTel caught our attention because of its commitment to SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), so we took a closer look at its software product, which enables ISPs to offer UM service (see "CyberTel Helps Hosts Offer SIP Service").

Ok, Time for the Alphabet Nuevo VPIM. IVM. IMAP Voice Extensions. SIP. SMTP. VoiceXML. Warning: If discussions of standards-based protocols make your eyes glaze over, it's time for you to move on to the next article.

Just as the lack of standards has delayed widespread implementation of UM in the enterprise, we believe that the adoption of standards will accelerate acceptance. The standards (or proposed standards or preapproved proposed standards) leading the way in the UM space are SIP and IVM (Internet Voice Mail), which was previously known as VPIM v3 (Voice Profile for Internet Mail version 3).

SIP provides a single, standard protocol to initiate a variety of UM-type communications, including Internet conferencing, telephony, presence, events notification and instant messaging. Currently SIP has more to do with the VoIP community than the UM community, but UM's horizons are expanding to include VoIP technologies, so we expect SIP to play a big role in UM's future.

IVM packages voicemail into a standards-based MIME e-mail format, which can be transported over existing e-mail infrastructures and delivered to any e-mail end point. Not only does IVM span the gulf between voicemail and e-mail, it can link one voicemail system to another -- even if the systems are from different vendors. IVM backers also plan to establish a directory service to support the lookup of routable addresses and to define a mapping specification with other voice-messaging systems.

Finally, we can't discuss messaging without spending at least a sentence on IMAP, which is also in line for a UM face-lift. IMAP Voice Extensions have been proposed to bring this widely adopted standard into the UM fold. And we can't discuss anything without mentioning XML (Extensible Markup Language). Yes, that's right: VoiceXML is an emerging standard for speech services.

UM is a technology whose time has finally arrived. If the standards efforts stay on track -- and if vendors adopt those standards across the board -- the day may come when you can sit stewing in your car in rush-hour traffic, access your e-mail and get the good news over your hands-free cell phone: You can make millions every month working at home. Just send us $19.95 and we'll tell you how.