e telecommunications industry during the past few years, but the market now appears to be poised for renewed growth. "There are several signs that the speech recognition industry is maturing," says Steve Cramoysan, a principal analyst with Gartner, a technology research firm located in Stamford, Connecticut. Many implementations provide proof that solutions that use speech recognition can deliver business value, as cost savings or improved customer service." Speech recognition performance has improved versus the products avail- able only a couple of years ago. As a result, it's becoming increasingly difficult for vendors to differentiate their wares purely on the basis of speech recog- nition success rates. Internet-based applications and standards, such as VoiceXML, are gaining market share, providing an increasingly distributed architecture that allows companies to leverage their investment in speech technology and allows services providers to offer speech recognition services to enterprises. "The clear market leaders today are Nuance and ScanSoft. Entry by Microsoft, IBM, and Intel into the market is providing significant momentum, and further changes in the vendor landscape are to be expected," notes Cramoysan. ON THE MENU-TELECOM SERVICES Perhaps the most important use of speech recognition technology over the next several years will be in speech integration systems that automate and streamline enterprise phone systems. Speech integration technology is nothing new, as any telephone caller who has ever barked back responses to a seem- ingly endless series of voice prompts can testify. But an improved generation of speech integration software, based on more powerful processors and emerg- ing Internet-focused standards, promises to make the technology more useful and cost effective. Until recently, organizations tended to shy away from speech integration because of the technology's complexity and cost. "I had one client who had 60 people on its [speech integration] project," says Elizabeth Ussher, an analyst wh