When Ken Jackowitz learned that customers were asking Office Depot's automated audio portal about the weather, he knew he was on to something, even though Office Depot's first impressions of voice technology weren't exactly stellar.

This was not because the idea of creating an audio portal wasn't an appealing one, says Jackowitz, Office Depot's vice president of business systems, who loves the idea of giving customers a broad array of options when interacting with the Delray Beach, Fla.-based office-supply giant.

The company already had a back-end infrastructure in place about a year ago, thanks to some planning ahead by its IT department; however, a disappointed Jackowitz put the audio project on the back burner "because the technology just was not that great."

Now, though, Office Depot has a sophisticated audio portal that is producing a return on investment Jackowitz calls "awesome."

More and more, the Internet talks back. Audio portals are gaining wider acceptance, as voice technology has finally become stable and easier to use. E-tailers and other businesses are adding audio to their mix, usually in CRM (customer relationship management), such as in Office Depot's system, or as a logical outgrowth of the Web designed to enrich the online shopping experience.

Office Depot is very pleased with the number of high-volume orders coming through the system. The audio call-center portal is so intuitive that callers sometimes forget they are dealing with technology -- particularly with the "Do you need more time?" feature.

"I spoke with one customer who said, 'I told the system I needed more time, and [the portal voice] started to hum, and eventually I started to ask her how the weather was there,'" Jackowitz remembers. "You don't feel like you're talking to a robotic system," he says.

Another kind of computer chat

"Having audio cues and the opportunity to participate in an almost literal verbal dialogue of some kind in order to call attention to a feature is absolutely critical," says Ben Elstein, carrier and enterprise communications research analyst at Aberdeen Group, in Boston.

"These solutions are really exciting," he adds. "They make the Internet fundamentally better by bringing all the dynamics of real-world shopping or real-world customer experiences to the Web. That's just cool."

Vendors are fighting it out in the audio portal space, from familiar names such as RealNetworks and Yahoo Broadcast to software makers such as NetByTel, BeVocal, and Beatnik.

"The first attempts embraced information access and not commerce," says George White, senior vice president of technology and interfaces at NetByTel. "The next phase was commerce, phones connected to Web sites. Now voice portals are accepting phone calls and retrieving information from Web databases, . . . databases that would normally be driving Web sites."

It was Boca

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