CUPERTINO, CALIF. - Adomo, whose speech-recognition package lets users check Microsoft Outlook e-mail via phone, is adding a way for business users to place an outbound call via Microsoft's Exchange server to answer e-mail.
The dial-out feature, to be included in the second version of AdomoMobile Communications Server later this summer, will provide an alternative to Adomo's current speech-activated response to e-mail, which lets a user dictate a digital-voice message that's stored in a .WAV file and sent to a recipient who can "listen" to it on a multimedia PC.
"It would be great to be able to do this," says Eric Manuel, deputy director in IS at the National Renewal Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Department of Energy lab in Golden, Colo., about the idea of placing an outbound call via e-mail. NREL installed AdomoMCS four months ago to let employees access e-mail via the phone. "Folks using this need to have access to their e-mail while traveling or just in the middle of traffic somewhere," he says.
AdomoMCS, which costs $12,000 for 50 to 100 users, is a server appliance that plugs into a corporate PBX and corporate LAN for access to a local Exchange server. Using a phone, a user calls a business number reserved for the AdomoMCS speech-recognition server. The caller then authenticates his identity by speaking his user ID and personal identification number.
Once authenticated to AdomoMCS, the user gets to hear his e-mail read to him. That recitation could be limited to just the sender's name and mail subject line or the entire text message. Adomo doesn't read attachments.
Users can tell Adomo to delete mail. Or they may answer it by recording a digital voice message that's attached as a .WAV file that can be heard by the recipient on a multimedia PC. Linux-based AdomoMCS makes use of the World Wide Web Consortium's Voice XML standard to perform the text-to-speech conversion.
The AdomoMCS doesn't need to match particular voice patterns, says Jeff Snider, Adomo's CEO and co-founder. Before co-founding Adomo in 1999 with CFO Jesper Stroe, Snider was vice president of enterprise sales at Ericsson. Earlier, the two founded TouchWave, a start-up whose voice-over-IP gateway was sold to Ericsson, which markets it as the WebSwitch.
Adomo has been easy to set up to work with Exchange 5.5 and 2000, according to Keith Hannah, network administrator at the Institute of Child Health Policy at the University of Florida, which has used phone-based e-mail access since AdomoMCS came out in beta-test version last year. It requires no special programming.
Hannah says he has seen only a few other products, primarily from IBM and Lucent, that provide phone-based access to e-mail.
Adomo: www.adomo.com
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