Speak carefully; this is a big schtick.

This month's special focus on computer telephony integration makes clear that the application with the most payback for vendors is the call center. Call centers are, without question, at the heart of today's consumer-sensitive businesses.

They have certainly come a long way in connecting

company data with a recognized caller ID. There was a time, not too long ago, when companies first using this technology had to back off a bit. I talked in 1992 to a retailer of contact lenses who was pleased with the company's call center and its ability to recognize callers. But, he said, being greeted by name disconcerted callers who had never been exposed to the idea. So, even though the agent knew who was calling, she would still ask for the name.

We seem to be past that now with most uses of incoming calls. But customers have grown so used to the technology that they are impatient if an agent doesn't know everything about their histories with the company as soon as he answers the call.

There's gold to be mined there, and a number of companies are working hard to do that. Mosaix, a new company formed from Digital Systems International and Viewstar, is rolling out an application that allows back office data to be accessible to an agent. The idea, according to Steve Adams, Mosaix VP, is to combine a work flow engine with customer relationship management.

Putting that information into the hands of agents brings up an interesting issue, and it isn't technology. As you put more decision-making power in the hands of an agent, you need to have an agent who can manage the information. Agents who know your business and can handle customers appropriately will be harder and harder to find.

The problem for the network manager will be to find ways to make that agent happy--which often means flexible scheduling and really good equipment, even if the agent is working from home.

I'm still fascinated by the rapid movement of interactive voice response toward ever more complicated and natural (to the user) applications. The most natural is clearly speech recognition, and I think the speech-driven auto attendant is the most likely to find its way quickly into many offices.

Vocalis--an English company with offices in Los Gatos, Calif., and Boston--has a natural speech auto attendant that is suitable for small or branch offices. Called Operetta, the attendant listens to callers and routes calls as requested. Vocalis says the system can manage up to 100 extensions, and works in a number of languages. Vocalis also has a CTI application that works in the call center.

Unisys has developed what it calls the Natural Language Speech Assistant with a tool kit to enable developers to create sophisticated speech CTI applications. It is trying to be the standard platform that will plug into most of the speech recognizers in the market and interpret them to the IVR call flow program. The development team is creating a number of preprogrammed exchanges from very simple to complex--it calls these "dialoguettes" (or, possibly, "dialogets").

All these products at increasingly reasonable prices suggest that we're going to see some dramatic speech applications, and that should enable businesses to bring costs down while still giving good customer service--which is what business wants from technology, after all.

But we will need some standard platforms and development tools to build these applications. Those are being provided largely by Natural MicroSystems, the pre-eminent supplier of such devices for the PC platform. Their prominence in the field has led us to interview NMS President Bob Schechter for our November cover. We think you'll find his take on all this interesting.