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Two Years With Harry, 9

To show that he wasn’t mad at me, Harry put this one in the same September ‘83 issue as the questionnaire. He didn’t even change my title.

Technology vs. Literacy

My house is sinking into the South Jersey Swamp. It is sinking under the weight of my second and third favorite things in life: books and toys. And the whole situation is symbolic of something going on in telecommunications today: the war between literacy and technology. Because both books and toys are involved, I find myself torn between two desirable and mutually exclusive ends.

I’m talking about message storage and retrieval, electronic mail and the like, of course. We all know, by now, that Jim Bair and the other office of the future people have proved that only about 30% of the business telephone calls reach the person for whom they’re intended on the first attempt. The great majority of calls thus ping-pong back and forth, getting nowhere. The impossibility of leaving a message more complicated than “Please have him call me on 609-429-6843” with a human being is well known, and inexpensive answering machines that cut you off after 30 seconds all tend to increase the ping-pong effect. What is being done about it?

There are two main trends. The first is to use keyboard coded messages, and the second records voice directly for later retrieval. Both are being developed rapidly in the market today, both have advantages and disadvantages, and both can be done in a variety of different ways. Right now, on existing telephone equipment, and even better in the future as the PBX makers add more and better features to their beasties.

Because, if I had to choose, I would pick books over toys, let’s look at literacy-based message systems first. In my opinion, anybody who cannot touch type is functionally illiterate. The sudden availability of telephone-CRT terminals (like Northern Telecom’s Displayphone, Rolm’s Cypress, AT&T’s whatever it is, etc.) show that tools are now available to handle alpha-numeric characters through telephone systems as easily as voice. The big advantage of such systems is the economical way their messages can be transmitted and stored. One minute of human speech is about 170 words. At 6 characters of 10 bits each per word, this rounds out to about 10,000 bits or 1000 ASCII characters. At 10 typed words per line, this amounts to about half a double-spaced page. Keyboard messages that are equivalent to two minutes of dictation or one typed page are seen to be quite modest in size. They can be sent quickly, even at 300 b/s, and can be stored in computer memory for future retrieval, using a minimum of space.

Several years ago, Danray announced a message center in which the attendant could use a terminal to enter messages from callers for a person not available at the moment. Further, a person planning to be out of the office could leave messages with the attendant to give to callers. The Rolm Electronic Mail System (REMS) could be used in the same way. There are other systems, particularly those developed for the telephone answering business, that do the same thing. Obviously, a station user with a modern terminal could directly compose and file messages for delivery. The Source, for instance, offers electronic mail boxes, and Western Union’s Easy Link service gives anybody with a personal computer access to TWX/TELEX, providing an electronic mail-box for incoming calls. It doesn’t take all that much memory to deal with the situation, even on a grand scale.

Contrast this, now, with that great toy, digitally coded speech. T-carrier PCM, at 64,000 bits per second, would take our one minute of dictation and code it into 3.84 MILLION bits for storage. Using some form of delta-mod, we might get away with one million bits. Allowing for other voice compression techniques, this might get down to 100,000 bits. Still an order of magnitude beyond simple storage of keyboard originated information. That’s why voice storage systems use large numbers of hard disks, and eat up memory like you wouldn’t believe.

Note that digital voice storage is used, not because it is efficient, but because it permits one system to store AND RETRIEVE messages for a large number of customers. That is, you can pick out one message from many for further operation. Further, with relatively standard computer programming techniques, you can send a message to multiple addresses, incorporate one message within another, put a verbal “buck-slip” on a voice message you have received and forward it to one or more other people, etc. Thus a most wonderful toy is placed in the hand of the illiterate (non-typing) executive, or anybody else. As one example of a stand alone system, check out VMX. For a built in system, with direct access to the message waiting lamp, see Rolm’s new release.

I love this new voice processing technology: voice compression and storage, voice synthesis, voice identification and related voice-print based security systems, and, ultimately, voice recognition to produce typed results of dictated material. I even like the keyboardless terminals being developed for illiterate executives. Great toys! Great potential!

But what about literacy? Will the ability to read and write no longer be a necessary executive skill? Will we drop the teaching of reading from our schools, and abandon five millennia of literature unless our computer can read it to us? Of less earth-shaking but more practical importance, will the time saved by dictation be more than offset by the longer messages that tend to be produced, with the obviously longer listening times required by the recipients? How about the verbal junk mail which is already reported by some with electronic mail systems to be a major problem?

I have a bias toward the written word. I would like to see the telephone set of the future be a CRT terminal with “soft” function keys to handle 1A2 key telephone features as well as the whole spectrum of other PBX features now standard, plus the ability to access computers and other keyboard terminals. We just about have the capability now with Cypress, Displayphone, and others. When the price gets down to the $400 region (about a third to a fifth of where it is now), the market could take off. But one should never underestimate the power of illiteracy, backed by the “keyboard fright” which separates corporate executives from the literate peasants. It can go either way. How do you vote?

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