I'm gonna sit right down and talk myself a letter.

I've been taken with the speech aspects of computing, beginning with the speech recognition technology incorporated in IBM's ViaVoice 98 (NNN, May1 and May 8).

Last week Reuters reported that IBM licensed its speech technology to Dutch electronics giant, Philips, and that they will collaborate on developing new speech products. On the same day, Intel invested $30 million in Belgian speech software developer Lernout & Hauspie, which already has a large investment from Microsoft.

All this is a drop in the bucket of computer speech developments, one part of a multi-faceted, industry-wide adventure that will not only change the way we use PCs, but the way PCs interact with the world.

Internet telephony (making phone calls via the Internet instead of via regular phone lines) is still in the toy stage, but not for long. Voice e-mail is here today, in a variety of forms, from sending voice messages by e-mail to sending e-mail by telephone.

I'm doing a lot of unlearning, and have shed about 50 pounds of misinformation, thanks to eMail inChorus, by Softlink.

A sophisticated tool, eMail inChorus upset my preconceived notions about the utility and value of sending voice and/or graphics e-mail. My experience with such things, based on receiving hokey e-mail greeting cards and graphical e-mail attachments, was that voice and graphics was a waste of Internet bandwidth. I have enough useless clutter without drooling dimwits debauching my drives with demented drivel.

Deploying advanced composition and compression algorithms, eMail inChorus makes it possible to economically and efficiently use the power of your personality, via your voice, to overcome one of the limitations of e-mail -- its inability to convey subtleties of meaning via inflection. It overcomes another by enabling you to combine your voice with customizable interactive graphics/text.

It's easy to install in Windows 9x/NT, easy to use, comes with a good quality microphone, and (for those who care) is MAPI-aware.

The recipient of your voice e-mail need not own a copy of eMail inChorus, as one click will attach a free, very small player (even a Mac player) to your message. It installs in seconds, and will work with virtually any e-mail program.

I tested without reading the manual and had no problems. Enter the e-mail address, subject, select voice, graphics or both, then click "record message." A simple voice control pops up. Click record and speak into the mike, click "stop" when finished. Then click "play" to hear your recording. You can edit it if you wish.

If you selected graphics an extensive set of templates appears, which you can customize with text and drawing tools to make a complete business presentation. You can include a live URL (uniform resource locator, or web address) object in the graphic. Templates range from quality business designs to stuff your kids will enjoy. You can import PowerPoint slides.

A complex graphic including a URL along with a six second voice message, which compressed to about 12k, took just 11 seconds to transmit.

The only fault I've found so far is the program's clumsy name.

eMail inChorus costs $49.95, and a voice-only (no graphics) version (E-Mail VoiceLink) is only $19.95. Demos are available at www.sonk.com.

Talk is cheap. But money isn't everything.

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