Personalized agent services are provided in a personal messaging device,
such as a cellular telephone or personal digital assistant, through services of
a speech recognizer that converts speech into text and a text-to-speech synthesizer
that converts text to speech. Both recognizer and synthesizer may be server-based
or locally deployed within the device. The user dictates an e-mail message which
is converted to text and stored. The stored text is sent back to the user as text
or as synthesized speech, to allow the user to edit the message and correct transcription
errors before sending as e-mail. The system includes a summarization module that
prepares short summaries of incoming e-mail and voice mail. The user may access
these summaries, and retrieve and organize email and voice mail using speech commands.
