 tied speech recognition into its phone directory and human resources systems. Using technology supplied by Phonetic Systems, the bank operates an automated voice attendant that lets callers connect to a specific employee simply by speaking that person's name. However, in the event of a major emergency that requires entire departments to move to a new location, the employees can call into the system to instantly create updated contact information. The information then becomes available to anyone calling the bank's attendant. The speech-based approach is designed to help bank employees resume their work as soon as possible, even before they have access to computers. "The automated attendant was already connected to our back-end systems," says Jeffrey Kuhn, senior vice president of business continuity and planning. "We simply expanded the number of data fields that are shared between the Phonetic's product, our HR system and our phone directory system." The biggest challenge Kuhn faced in deploying the technology was getting it to mesh with the bank's older analog PBX systems. That problem was eventually solved, although the interface ports on the old PBX units must now be man- ually set, which is a minor inconvenience. Speech integration's primary benefit for callers is convenience, since the technology eliminates the need to wait for a live agent. Problems handling foreign accents, minor speech impediments, and quirky word pronunciations have largely faded away because software developers have given their prod- ucts the capability to recognize and match a wider array of voice types. "Every four to five years, speech technologies improve by a factor of two," says Kai- Fu Lee, vice president of Microsoft Speech Technologies. Dollar Thrifty's DuPont says his company's internal research has found an end user satisfac- tion level of around 93 percent. "It either met or exceeded their need to get information, and they had an improved perception of our company," he says. For enterprises, speech integration's bottom-line