Intel is including the speech technology in its next processor, code-named Katmai, which is due out in the first quarter of 1999. Experts are predicting that by 2000 the technology will be able to go beyond simple speech-to-text input.

"You will be able to say, 'What were sales for last September and how does that compare for this September?,'" said Steven Rondel, president of Conversational Computing, in Redmond, Washington.

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Microsoft is also throwing its weight behind speech recognition, and will eventually replace the current GUI with spoken commands. The software giant will put its Whistler text-to-speech engine, for accessing data such as e-mail over voice telephone lines, in Windows NT 5.0 and its Whisper speech-to-text engine in a future operating system.

With OS and chip support in place, PCs will soon become personal assistants. "Users will say, 'Print two copies of my financials, in landscape mode on the network printer,'" said Bob Kutnick, chief technology officer at speech product supplier Lernout & Hauspie.

Intel started its project by creating a separate speech team, spun off from its original Katmai development team, to deal solely with speech technology, sources said. That group developed a new set of Katmai instructions that will work with the "hidden Markov model," algorithms commonly used by speech developers to improve speech-recognition accuracy and the speed of recognition.

The current speech algorithms are excellent, according to Raphael Wong, manager of worldwide speech programs at Intel. But the stumbling block until now has been the inadequacy of the processors. With the introduction of 450-MHz and 500-MHz processors in 1999, all of that will change.

The new Katmai instruction set from Intel will also improve the capability of voice and data to work over phone lines without distortion, according to Bill Meisel, president of TMA Associates, a speech-technology consultancy.

In 1999, voice-enabled applications used over phone lines will make major inroads into corporate services, according to David Nahamoo, senior manager of human language technologies at IBM Research. Users will have their e-mail, contact information, and datebook appointments translated into voice and spoken to them over the phone.