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 GOING PLACES: Ian Gordon-Cumming, who says road warriors will soon be able to have their e-mail 'read' to them via computer over their mobile phones Picture: ANDRZEJ SAWA
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E-mail that will make you sit up and listenMOBILE workers in Britain will soon be able to get their e-mail on the run when British Telecommunications releases a system whereby their e-mail is "read" to them over the phone via computer. Imagine that it is 8.50am, you have a deadline to meet and you're stuck in the traffic. You need to retrieve an e-mail about a contract before a meeting with the chief executive of the company, and it's on your PC in the office. What do you do? Panic? British Telecommunications has invented an e-mail voice system to solve the problem. It allows users to dial into their computers wherever they may be and activate the system, which reads out loud their e-mail while they are on the go. The new product, called the Fevum system (Fax, e-mail and Voice Unified Messaging), enables people to hold fax, e-mail and voice messages in a Microsoft Exchange account. Messages held in the store may be accessed in the normal way using Microsoft Exchange on a corporate network or by dial-up. The system is now being tested at the British Telecommunications Labs in the UK. It uses the Microsoft Exchange platform and Laureate, British Telecommunications' text-to-speech system. Says Ian Gordon-Cumming, British Telecommunications representative in South Africa: "Fevum is our answer to the need for high-quality text-to-speech services that will increasingly become an important requirement in many communications applications. It will allow easy customer access to text-based information, anywhere and at any time, using fixed or mobile telephony." In time, the system may be made available in South Africa, he says. The Fevum service is one of many products being developed, tested and championed by Professor Peter Cochraine, the head of research at British Telecommunications' labs. Cochraine was in Singapore recently to introduce some of British Telecommunications' revolutionary products which give a glimpse into the future and demonstrate how technology will affect every aspect of people's lives. - © The Telegraph, London
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