Traditional touch-tone Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platforms have been around and stable for many years, widely accepted by organizations as a cornerstone of self-service strategy. Speech recognition has also been around for many years, but until very recently had only found very limited and specialized use. But just over the last 18 months, adoption of speech applications has spread from virtual obscurity to the point where one in three large organizations are at some stage of implementation. Now every significant traditional IVR vendor, and a whole host of others - both well-known vendors and new vendors - are touting some version of the speech recognition story as the way to go.