But the services on the market from companies including phone carriers such as Verizon Communications, cable providers such as Comcast and Internet voice vendors such as Packet8 and Vonage aren't particularly portable, often requiring special hardware and making it difficult to access your phone account on a public terminal.
But since EarthLink will have to cover the additional cost of leasing local lines, the product is likely to be more expensive than the more traditional VoIP services offered by cable companies such as Comcast Internet voice vendors such as Vonage, and EarthLink itself.
Tellabs had acquired Salix Technologies, a voice switch vendor, in December 1999, and Netcore Systems, an Internet protocol (IP and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch vendor, in June 1999.
More often than not, the most prominent voice among the vendors of such gear has been a 37-year-old entrepreneur previously best known for his arcane research achievements: Joseph J. Atick, the chairman and chief executive of Visionics.
Despite millions of orders for voice enabled devices, vendors have yet to map the uncharted territory of voice enabled search and advertising.
"However, if voice-SMS/voice-messaging vendors can develop applications that do provide significantly more utility than voice-SMS, like Yiip or Qwips, then it's possible that these applications could do better in developed markets," she added.
John Antanaitis, vice president of marketing for voice and videoconferencing vendor Polycom, says "We're in transition mode from video conferencing to video communications.
Picturesque plazas, baroque 17th-century cathedrals and the snow-covered peaks beyond form a backdrop to a vibrant city in motion: indigenous people in traditional garb and bowler hats mingle with mestizos amid the sing-song voices of street vendors, newspaper sellers and shoeshine boys, while the scent of Andean cooking spills out of open-sided restaurants and food stalls.
Dr. Doddington hopes that whatever comes, future vendors of voice authentication systems will be wary of making facile comparisons to fingerprints, less they offer false assurances.
"He was a big calabash," Chamoiseau tells us, in the collective voice of the market vendors, "embracing within himself both flower and fruit, and just as a single mango bespeaks the essence of the tree, what he was, we were".
Few of the key vendors of voice cards–hardware devices that convert analog telephone calls to a digital bit stream, and vice versa saw anything to gain by rocking the voice mail boat they were profiting from.
