THE FUTURE AS SEEN THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

What if your phone could talk to you? Not just relay the voice communications of others, but really talk to you: alert you that there's a message in your voice mailbox or tell you that your beloved Boston Red Sox swept the World Series midnight on Sunday (or console you if you're a Colorado Rockies fan).

It may sound like artificial intelligence, but the technology is really a new form of voice notification with a catch: It integrates directly with a Bluetooth headset. Intervoice has developed a technology it calls Whisper that sends halftone notifications from a phone to a Bluetooth headset. The service can be as simple as a voice message notifying you of a new voicemail, text message or e-mail. But Intervoice has much bigger plans for the technology than a simple alert, said Scot Harris, director of global product marketing for Intervoice.

“People aren't listening to their phones anymore,” Harris said. “They're looking at them. It's only natural that we extend the capability of that Bluetooth headset from mere voice to all of the other functions of the phone.”

Intervoice imagines a scenario where a subscriber in the middle of a call hears a “whisper” notification through a Bluetooth headset that a voicemail message is waiting, along with the caller's name. The user then could choose to put the current call on hold to return the other call by using voice commands to play the specific message. After hearing the message, the subscriber could then respond immediately — again using voice commands to reply via voice call, short message service or text, accessing Intervoice's server-based voice-to-text solution for the latter two. The user then can set a priority for any response from the recipient, telling Whisper to notify immediately when a message or call from that person is initiated. Then the user can switch back to the holding call. All of this would be accomplished without touching the phone, Harris said.

The platform has applications beyond communications, Harris said. Calendar and contact list functions can be integrated just as easily with the service, as can the broader world of push content. Sports score updates, a massive swing in a selected stock price or warning of an upcoming traffic jam could be pushed from the Whisper server to any phone and headset. GPS and presence-based controls also could be added to the service, allowing people to receive work notifications during business hours and personal notifications during off-hours, as well as alerts that a colleague or friend is nearby.

Intervoice hasn't commercially released the platform yet, but it plans to begin offering its first server-client solution with basic voice notification capabilities in 2008. From there it plans to layer on capabilities, gradually taking away more and more of the need to look at the phone screen when a Bluetooth headset is engaged.

But why stop at voice? If the goal is to make the phone a receiver for information that stays in the pocket, visual data may be in the offing. Bluetooth audio is already integrated into sunglasses; adding a visual display isn't as science fiction as you might think, Harris said.