Hello! This is Voice Mail Speaking

One day last month Linda Hiwot, a Brooklyn junior high school teacher, got a surprise when she phoned her bank for a credit-card balance. Instead of the familiar human teller, she was answered by a computer-generated voice that told all callers with Touch-Tone phones to "press 1 now," thus beginning a series of steps that would eventually lead to her balance. When she called the IRS about an overdue tax check, another computer voice directed her to "push 9" for refunds. Even a local department store had acquired a robot operator, which like an overeager clerk insisted on taking Hiwot on a guided tour of the entire store ("For furniture, home decorating or major appliances, push 3"). Desperate for human contact, she finally dialed a friend, only to be invited to leave a message at the sound of the tone. "It was like the Twilight Zone," says Hiwot. "I felt there was nobody out there but machines."

It is a feeling Hiwot, and everybody else, had better get used to. The U.S., and much of the world, is in the midst of a sweeping technological conversion, replacing human secretaries and operators with a new kind of high-tech wizardry known variously as automated answering systems, voice-messaging units or, most simply, voice mail. In the past six years, tens of thousands of voice-messaging systems have been installed in stores, offices and government agencies. The units answer phones, route callers and dispense information ranging from baseball scores and movie reviews to weather reports and horoscopes. Even the Vatican has a voice-mail system, allowing devout callers to hear messages recorded by the Pope.

The technological forerunner of the modern voice-messaging system was the common telephone-answering machine. But now, instead of talking to a simple tape recorder, people are conversing with a computer at the end of the line. At the heart of the new systems are special-purpose computer chips and software that convert human speech into bits of digital code. These digitized voices can then be stored on magnetic disks and retrieved in a flash, just like any other piece of computer data.

The simplest systems do just what the old answering machines do: pick up the phone, play a prerecorded greeting and record whatever the caller has to say. Some add technological bells and whistles, like push-button controls that let their owners save messages or dispatch replies -- to one person or to hundreds of people. Other systems are set up to dispense information, offering callers a menu of choices and playing the messages they select. The most powerful machines combine voice-message units with huge computer files, which enable callers to use their telephones to navigate through long lists of stock quotes or catalog items. Some units even allow a caller to order merchandise and charge it to a credit card, without ever speaking to a human.