Voice portals are in their infancy, but when they're at their best, they allow you to navigate sites by voice alone, using both voice-recognition and voice-synthesis techniques. At their worst, they're frustrating and can have comical foibles. For instance, one site interpreted a cough as a request for the weather in Beirut.

Schaumburg-based Motorola Inc. has introduced its VoxML, or Voice Markup Language, that ultimately will let people get information and online content from the Internet over the phone. The language translates the voice request to the language of the World Wide Web. Once the system retrieves the information, the computer provides it in VoxML, and the answer is translated from text to speech for the caller…

VoxML's success depends on the creation of so-called voice portals, say a Yahoo! or America Online service that works by voice command instead of through the PC, Meisel said.