Tan Ee Sze

Despite the turmoil wracking the global telecommunications market, the sector has fared relatively well in the Asia-Pacific, chalking up 20 per cent growth in 2001 and keeping on track for a 12 to 15 per cent compound annual growth rate over the next five years.

Embedded speech recognition, developing in tandem with the growth of distributed speech recognition (DSR) systems, will be the next class of voice technologies that will be important in Asia, said Steve Chambers, vice president of Worldwide Marketing at SpeechWorks International Inc.

Version 2.0 of Oracle9i Application Server will relieve Java developers of the need to write wire-level representation of data in Simple Object Access Protocol.

Optical technologies such as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) are moving swiftly from traditional long-haul segments into the metropolitan and access networks, and picking up IP (Internet protocol) momentum along the way.