Understanding speech is harder for a computer than mapping the human genome.

Speech recognition is hard. In fact, it's arguably the most difficult thing a computer can do.

It took humans millions of years to develop our myriad languages. It's unrealistic to expect members of a relatively new species, like Julie, to understand them all in less than a decade.

Homonyms present a unique challenge. So do fuzzy cell phone connections and background noise. And the software often doesn't recognize words that are spoken too quickly, or said at the same time that the system is speaking to you.

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But by far the biggest obstacle is that no two people speak the same way—computers still have trouble with different dialects and accents, as well as speech impediments. Good for biometric identification, bad for speech recognition.

Taking all of these factors into account, it's no wonder that speech systems often seem to be more wrong than right.

"It's a nontrivial problem to recognize different sounds and figure out what's being said," said Walter Rolandi, a speech recognition consultant and president of the Voice User Interface Co. LLC in Columbia, S.C. "It's hugely complicated."

So why bother using speech at all? Touch-tone systems are sufficiently aggravating, but people seem to have gotten used to them. And with the advent of the Web, several complex customer service tasks can be handled sans human, even more cheaply than with touch-tone.

Still, Amtrak claims to have seen return on its $4 million investment in Julie within 18 months of installation. But according to Matthew Hardison, Amtrak's chief of sales distribution and customer service, the new system "is really to give customers alternatives for the most common reasons they call—train status, schedules and fares, and simple reservations." He added, "Customers on the road will not have access to the Web, or may be waiting at an unstaffed station for a train to arrive and need to know when it is expected."

According to David Mussa, vice president of reservations at Wyndham Worldwide, the Dallas-based hotel subsidiary of $20 billion Cendant Corp., speech recognition software handles tasks that would be too confusing to attempt using touch-tone systems—such as providing customers with hotel information and the ability to confirm or cancel reservations, a service it rolled out in October 2004.

With more than 100 hotels around the world, "To use touch-tones to provide that information would be ridiculous," Mussa said.

And it would be unrealistic to only provide that information online, he added, explaining, "Voice is still the largest reservation channel at Wyndham, and not everyone is at their PCs when trying to get information or book Wyndham hotels. With speech, you can accomplish tasks that cannot be done through touch-tone at all."

Wyndham reported that of the 2.5 million phone calls it receives each year, roughly 15 percent are completed without the caller ever speaking to a live agent.

When Will It Work? When Will It Be Worth the Work?

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