Intel's Big Shout Out To The Internet

Looking to get a jump-start on a large, untapped market, Intel isoutlining its strategy to dominate integrated voice services on the Internet.

"Building out the speech-enabled Internet requires an ecosystem," said John Miner, VP and general manager of Intel's communications products group, during his keynote speech at the NetWorld+Interop trade show in Atlanta. And who better than big-fish Intel to start organizing the rest of the ecosystem? Intel plans to supply the building blocks for a voice-friendly Web, including client platforms, servers, as well as communication and networking products and services.

But the idea of using voice prompts from a phone to access the Web isn't for everybody, at least not today. "That's probably a little way off for us right now," says Richard Allen, a civil engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "We already have a lot to do with our Web site and a lot of improvements we could make to our pages right now" without trying to make it voice-accessible, Allen says.

Speech-to-Web portals are part of Intel's NetStructure product line, Miner says, and will run on Intel-architecture servers loaded with Intel digital-signal-processing cards and speech- recognition software.