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>> What will unified communications mean for the average
person?
>> Well today when we think about the phone, we think
hey, it's quite reliable, we have all these different
phone numbers. If we give out our phone numbers
somebody can call us when we might prefer not to be
disturbed. We can get busy signals, come back to our
office and not really know who's called us. When we
leave to go away we think geez, will people be able to
get in touch with us. So it's -- it's not perfect. We
ask people if they could transfer phone calls easily and
actually only one out of three said that was something
they were successful at doing. And so that phone on
your desk with all those buttons and only that tiny
screen just hasn't evolved like your mobile phone has or
like your Windows PC has. So there's real chance as we
move the phone off of its own infrastructure, the PBX,
its own wiring, its own desktop handset, move it on to
the Internet, Windows-based servers running a standard
platform. Any type of peripheral phone innovation that
any company wants to build, any type of software that
can connect in and think about your type of business and
what the user interface on the nice big screen should be
for calls moving around. There's a lot of opportunity
here. So it's telephony done in a much better way. We
say unified communications because as you bring the
screen in and the video, we didn't want people to think
its just voice, but it's much, much more.
>> What do you think the desktop phone in the office
looks like five years from now, or the cell phone.
>> Well, I think for some people the idea of having a
desktop PC, a portable PC, and then the phone that fits
in their pocket -- that would be enough for them
because we can connect in to the now software equivalent
of the PBX in the same rich way. You have the nice
directory and the standard relationships with people.
To the degree you have a desk phone, it could either be
just a peripheral to the PC, the USB or wireless-type
device that's going through the Windows PC, or it can be
a stand-alone device. Or now you'll have a much bigger
screen, you'll have some touch type capability, and so
even transferring calls can be a simple thing to do.
And seeing the presence as you scroll through the names
of the people you call. It will just show up right
there.
>> It seems like one of the keys to really improving
both business and personal communications is sort of
these natural language interfaces, like voice and touch
coming into computing. How much change do you think
we're going to see in that area in the next few years.
>> Well, I think that we can unify communications
without too much recognition activity. Simply being
able to send the calls around. If you do a video
meeting, being able to record that so you can go back
and find it. But we can do even more if we have the
recognition piece in. We can do the transcript to the
meeting that you could search the text and find the part
that you're interested in, we can take your notes on the
phone call, have those -- dictate those out very
easily. And so we are investing heavily in speech
recognition as an adjunct to this. For example, you
should be able to say, hey, transfer this call to so and
so, instead of even going over to the PC screen. So we
will be incorporating that in. We recently acquired
Tell Me. They have a huge database of the different
ways that people talk when asked these questions. So
we're training our speech engines around that.
