Word: landings
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...dial the number, and the automated voice answers. "Our menu has changed," the voice says. And you are thinking, Yes, it's going to be even worse than before. Customer experiences like those thrill Karl-Heinz Land, whose VoiceObjects program threatens to make us actually enjoy automated-voice systems...
...same way that Apple's Macintosh created a graphic user interface, GUI (pronounced goo-ey), that made it easy for ordinary mortals to use personal computers, Land has laid claim to what he unabashedly calls a VUI (voo-ey), or vocal user interface. The idea is that companies need an idiot-proof building-block system to assemble easy-to-use services with which customers feel comfortable. "All business is vocal," Land likes...
VoiceObjects' claim to fame is not that it has reinvented voice-recognition applications but that the company has found a way to make voice applications easy to construct and easy to use. "We're like Henry Ford," says Land. "Ford didn't invent the automobile. He developed the assembly line, and that made the automobile affordable and accessible to a mass market...
...results have been explosive. Huge deposits of minerals, including, at Jabaluka in the Northern Territory, the richest known uranium deposits in the southern hemisphere, lie beneath the earth. No less than 15% of the total land area of Australia is owned or controlled by Aboriginal groups and councils. Some 700 land claims, covering 50% of the Australian landmass, await determination by the courts, and more are coming in every day. This avalanche has caused legal and bureaucratic gridlock. Few Aboriginal groups accept mediation by whites. No two groups agree on land use. Some, for instance, think that tribal land should...
...then there is the question of proving original ownership. Sometimes a group can show it has been on a given tract of land since records began. But this situation is rare. Often a claim is just that, a mere assertion unbacked by documents of any kind, made by Aborigines who live in an entirely different area. This infuriates some Australian graziers, especially those whose stations (ranches) are on land they do not own outright but hold in lease from the Crown. A native title claim on their land, even a weak one, can freeze their assets and put bank loans...