CHAPTER 5 Information Input and Output
Bridging the Gap Between the Magazine and the Internet Forbes Magazine is distributing a free hand-held scanner to almost one million subscribers. Readers can now scan barcodes embedded throughout the magazine then be connected automatically to a Web site, often that of an advertiser. In the magazine industry, this is considered an experiment; we will have to wait to see the benefits to magazine, the advertisers, and the readers.
Speech recognition replaces touch-tone phone system First Union Bank, one of the largest banks in the United States, will be implementing a speech recognition system to handle more than 100 million calls each year. Customers who have been using a cumbersome touch-tone telephone system interface will now be able to simply speak their requests and information directly into the system. This is not the first speech recognition system to be implemented, but it is one of the largest. We can expect more interaction via voice over the coming years.