Voice-enabled services are here and on the way, for both business and leisure applications, some of which are obvious - and others less so.

"Suppose you could speak new addresses into your contact list instead of tap, tap, tapping in the details," says Rhonda Benjamin, senior consultant at Deloitte Consulting, sketching some forthcoming attractions in the voice-enabled world.

"How would your work day be changed if you could access all your corporate databases from a mobile phone - anywhere at all?

"How much money could you save your company by giving critical supply chain partners access to order tracking through a simple phone call?"

So much has been promised, and no doubt more facilities will soon be announced - but what is available now? Today's services and those in the very near future, can be divided into a four basic categories:

* First, unified messaging services.

* Second, services that use voice to provide quick improvements in input and driver navigation on mobile and Wap (Wireless application protocol) phones.

* Third, voice portals.

* Fourth, services that use voice to provide security.

The first application, unified messaging services, are the main application for voice-enabled services. A typical example comes from Hitoori (www.hitoori.com) that integrates voice with converged mobile services. The acquisition of a Hitoori mobile number provides various call management services, such as the facility to redirect calls, voice mail and faxes in more than 100 countries from any phone or personal computer.

Services with more advanced business-oriented features include Avaya (www.avaya.com) and Canbox (www.canbox.com). These companies provide unified messaging services that integrate with e-mail clients such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes. Using a touch-tone telephone, users can, for example, have their e-mail messages read to them using a text-to-speech software.

A similar service is aimed at the gadget-literate teenage market: the voice on the phone is in the style of US rapper Kool Moe Dee. It comes from VoxSurf and Talking Drum (www.dkode.com). Called Kode, the first service is voice mail accessed with voice commands.

The second category is voice services connected to

Wap phones. Yeoman (www.yeomangroup.plc.uk) has just launched what it claims is the world's first navigation technology that gives drivers turn-by-turn voice directions through a GSM mobile phone.

To listen to instructions again, the driver simply taps a number on the phone. If the driver is still lost, help is available from a call centre operatory. A similar service comes from the Ministry of Transport in Quebec using technology from Locus Dialogue (www.mtq.gouv.qc.ca). Using a mobile phone, a free-phone number will yield details of, say, road conditions on a route specified by voice instructions.

The system responds with detailed and segmented information. For example, "From Montreal to X, conditions are clear. From X to Y conditions are icy. From Y to Z conditions are icy and visibility is poor. From Z to Sherbrooke, the road is closed."

The third category is voice portals. "With voice portals, the voice equivalents of Yahoo! and AOL, the killer applications are likely to be those that voice-enable the enterprise," says W.S. "Ozzie" Osborne, general manager of IBM Voice Systems.

There are major benefits to reap in accessing ERP and SAP information using wireless voice platforms, he says. Meanwhile, the returns on investment figures described by companies selling enterprise solutions are impressive. Among these applications are field staff access to work ticketing, where instead of requiring a dispatcher to inform them of their next job, they can dial in and obtain all the infor mation they need, cutting cycle time significantly. Other examples include savings in call centres, order tracking and automatic invoicing.

When it comes to voice-enabled services that leverage security functionality, a good example is Qpass (www.qpass.com), which provides secure and intuitive voice-activated buying via a mobile phone using the Qpass Talkwallet.

Users make purchases by speaking requests in so-called natural language. There is no need for separate PIN numbers or manual data entry on the phone. A typical conversation between the customer centre and a user might be:

* Customer centre - "Welcome. Please tell me your account number." Users then identify themselves with a short phrase including the password.

* Customer centre - "Your voice has been verified. Where would you like to go?"

* User - "What's available?'.

* Customer centre - "News, stock quotes, sports, weather, finance and travel."

And so on. Customers are billed to credit or debit cards through Qpass' transaction processing service.

Not that choice is everything. John Maclean, marketing director for the e-services division at Lucent Technologies, suggests it will not, in fact, be the "killer concept" for voice. "General consumers may prefer pre-packaged supplies of information to choose from. For example, Package A may contain sports, travel and weather; Package B may contain stock prices, e-mail access and travel information.

"We should not forget that consumers using mobiles do not have endless time to search for information or to scroll through their services to find the most appropriate one, as they may do when seated in front of a PC or a TV," he says. Over the next few years it seems inevitable that voice-enabled services will become a commodity, available not merely on mobile devices and PCs but for turning on lights and appliances, opening doors, and starting cars.

But if the world of voice-enabled services already sounds exciting, Ray Woabank, mobile commerce researcher at Butler Group, notes that several vendors deliberately do not offer a solution as part of their standard offering, as they fear that the "delivered quality will turn users off".

In other words, computers are not quite speaking our language yet.