Walk down the main street of a small town in the Midwest and you’ll see a corner bar whose proprietor has hung a sign promising "Free Beer Tomorrow." Come back the next day, and the bartender will, of course, tell you the beer is free tomorrow, not today.

That little joke is playing out in less amusing fashion with several hyped technologies—speech recognition; phones with Web browsers based on the Wireless Application Protocol, or WAP; Internet-based telephone calls; interactive television; and online bill payment. All have been touted for years—some for more than a decade—as having the potential to revolutionize business by giving consumers new ways to purchase goods, gather information, and get service. Yet the combined effect of the technologies has so far been almost imperceptible. Their promoters could be accused of, in effect, hanging out signs promising: "All Your Problems Solved...Tomorrow."

It’s not that these technologies don’t hold promise. Most hold enormous promise. It’s just that the predictions about when they will start to fulfill that promise have been wildly optimistic.

Given that corporations and consumers have to figure out whether these technologies are worth their time and money, I immersed myself in them for a few weeks so I could provide a feel for whether tomorrow is even close to dawning. I focused not on what the technologies could eventually do—those predictions are already out there, in force, from a host of research firms—or on the slick, inner workings of these innovations. Instead, I focused on whether they do anything useful today.

"Don’t tell me how fast [a] machine goes," says Michael Dertouzos, author of The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us. "Tell me how much earth it can move."

Here is a look at how much earth each of these new technologies is currently capable of moving:

SPEECH RECOGNITION
Speech recognition has been touted for more than a decade as a solution to whatever ails you. Today, it is described as a key component of "mobile commerce" that will help consumers use wireless devices to conduct business from anywhere, anytime. Proponents say consumers will use speech recognition to bark a number into a cellphone, dictate a letter, surf the World Wide Web, and send and summon e-mail. The Kelsey Group Inc., a technology research firm, estimates that the technology itself—voice-recognition services and related hardware and software—will generate more than $15 billion in annual revenue by 2005.

Maybe not.

Despite the best efforts of software purveyors like Dragon Systems Inc., International Business Machines Corp., Microsoft Corp., Philips Electronics NV, and America Online Inc., as well as voice-activated services with cute names like Tellme Networks Inc., HeyAnita Inc., and BeVocal Inc. that offer gateways to the Internet, commands are often missed. Words are mangled. Figures get jumbled.

When, for example, I used BeVocal to try to find information about Lake Tahoe, Calif., it heard the words as "Waco, Ohio," "Lake Carmel, New York," or "Lake Park, Iowa." TellMe has a maddening habit of adding extra numbers to a home’s street address.

Some gaffes can be downright laughable. According to visitors’ postings at Computing Out Loud’s Web site, a speech-recognition program turned "erythematous," which is medicalese for red, into "hairy feminists." The dictated sentence, "We just finished a large turkey dinner, and I’m expecting to see you shortly," came back, "I’m expecting obesity shortly." The word "sociopathic" returned as "go see a Catholic." "Synagogue" was rendered as "Santa gas."

Speech recognition is "definitely a work in progress," says Terry Gold, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Gold Systems Inc. which is developing a platform called Vonetix that can be used for PC and wireless speech-recognition tasks. And he’s a bull on the technology.

WAP PHONES
Jupiter Communications Inc., a research firm, predicts that 102 million U.S. consumers will use mobile devices to go online by 2003. Another research firm, Cahners In-Stat Group, says that almost all wireless telephones will have mini-browsers and Internet-access capability by the end of 2002.

Perhaps, but only if the technology moves way beyond the WAP phones that have been promoted so hard over the past couple of years. Despite what manufacturers say, WAP phones simply aren’t desktops in the hand.

Keying in numbers on a WAP phone’s tiny keyboard is about as easy as using a pair of scissors while wearing a catcher’s mitt. Screens are small and hard to read. Information gets downloaded at pokey speeds. Few Web sites have been redesigned for use by WAP phones, so available content is thin. The phones suffer from the same limited coverage that can afflict all cellphones. For good measure, hardware prices are high—latest-generation units can run $600. No wonder that, in many users’ lexicons, WAP stands for "What A Pain," and takeup rates are quite low at carriers like AT&T Wireless and Verizon Communications Inc.. [Context predicted as much in The Great Lie, "Web Phon(i)es," February/March 2000.]

When I used the Kyocera QCP 3035 cellphone to connect with the New York Times Web site, I had to wait while my phone first displayed headers for the Times automobile, jobs, and real estate classified ad sections. Only then did the "quick news" and "front-page" selections appear. When I clicked on "front page," it took another few seconds for the lead article to appear—or, rather, for 21 semi-legible words to appear on the phone’s green screen that measures 1 3/4 inches by 1 1/2 inches. Scrolling through that article, 21 words at a shot, took me more than 10 minutes.

I think not.

INTERNET TELEPHONY
Boxer Sonny Liston’s manager once said, "Sonny has his good points. It’s his bad points that ain’t so good."

Ditto for voice calls over the Internet. The technology has good points—it’s functional and inexpensive. But, like Liston, it blows up frighteningly often.

First, I had to wrestle with the equipment. Internet telephony requires a computer, microphones, software, speakers, and a keyboard. Plugging everything in and figuring out how to use it took more than 30 minutes. Then, I still had to line up passwords so I could use a telephone service’s Web site.

Once I got set up, I merely had to click on a telephone number on my computer screen to generate a call. But, when I talked to people, their voices sounded muddy or crackly. Their speech was often halting. (The problem is Internet telephony breaks a conversation down into small, digital packets before transmitting them. At their destination telephone or computer, the packets are reassembled, but network congestion on the Internet can keep packets of information from arriving at the other end at the same time.)

For some reason, my own voice often echoed as though it was bouncing off the bottom of a large steel drum. I also found that lots of long-distance calls were dropped before even being completed.

Advocates of Voice-over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, optimistically report that it handled almost three million calls last year. But that is out of about 650 billion local and long-distance calls placed last year in the U.S. alone, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

My experience with services with free or almost-free PC-to-PC or PC-to-telephone calls in the U.S. is that I got what I paid for.

INTERACTIVE TELEVISION
John Malone, the chairman of Liberty Media Corp. and a guru in cable-TV business circles, told an industry conference last December that "interactive TV will be the biggest and most profitable service in the industry." Of course, this is the same man who declared back in 1992 that cable would soon offer 500 channels.

Trouble is, none of the major players in interactive TV—and there are many—has yet to put together a collection of services that is close to compelling.

EchoStar Communications Corp., the satellite TV service provider, is probably the closest. But its DISHPlayer set-top box and wireless keyboard are just OK. When I typed in, say, "The Odd Couple" or "Dan Patrick," the box instantly summoned the right show. I had access to the Internet, albeit slow access, over a 56k modem. I was able to pause, replay, and eventually record the movie The Age of Innocence with little trouble.

All of that is fun, at first. But it is a nuisance hooking up the wires connecting the TV set, DISHPlayer box, telephone, and a gizmo that can deliver a high-definition television link. The costs—$300 for the DISHPlayer, plus $15 for the keyboard, plus $25 a month for Internet access, plus $300 for the HDTV modulator, and so on—add up in a hurry. Besides, I already have a computer that I use to do my e-mail and surf the Web.

I never did work up the courage to try the interactive TV with my wife and two kids in the room. I already get enough grief for trying to own the remote control and for channel-surfing. Somehow, I knew that I wouldn’t get away with be-bopping around on the Internet to check out things that occurred to me while watching a TV show.

EchoStar executives don’t quite promise free beer tomorrow; they say it will take two to three years for interactive TV to become fully functional and affordable. But I wonder whether even that isn’t too optimistic. I played with the prototype for the next-generation system, which, among other things, let me click on icons on the Weather Channel to call up local weather forecasts and let me call up stats during a sports broadcast. Bottom line: better, but still not great.

A consulting firm, Strategy Analytics, declares that 625 million people worldwide will have "access" to interactive digital TV services by 2005. The question is whether they will want to use it.

For me, what I like about TV is that I can veg out in front of it. I want someone to entertain me. I don’t want to work at TV.

ONLINE BILL PAYING
This one always felt like a no-brainer. If you do the math, you find that corporations in the U.S. alone would save tens of billions of dollars a year on printing and first-class postage if they could send a significant percentage of their bills electronically. Corporations and their banks would save almost as much on the back end, by collecting and processing payments online.

From the consumer standpoint, online bill payment saves time and hassle, not to mention trees. Once I took a few minutes to designate which companies I intended to pay online, I could handle paper bills by going to my bank’s Web site, clicking a mouse a couple of times, and typing in the amount I owed. After a similar amount of setup for bills that I receive electronically, I could go to the Web site of a service such as Paytrust Inc., where a couple of mouse clicks would pay each bill. The service even keeps track of my records and makes them available instantly. No muss, no fuss, no more rummaging through my filing cabinet.

But when Wirthlin Worldwide, a marketing research firm, recently polled 551 adults, it found that only 13% use the Internet to pay bills. Wirthlin cited "people’s fears regarding the security of their information."

I’ll admit that, even as a fairly sophisticated consumer of technology, I find myself wondering: Can these payment services really be trusted? Will they loot my account? Some gave me comfort because of their established names, such as Quicken, Charles Schwab & Co. Inc., and Microsoft Corp. But they didn’t seem to try very hard to allay the fears about online payment. For instance, I sent several e-mails to StatusFactory.com, asking how it would protect customers’ information if it went out of business—a question I raised because some failed dot-coms have tried to violate agreements with customers and sell information about them. StatusFactory never responded.

Some services compound the emotional problem by being incomplete. Wells Fargo & Co., for instance, doesn’t have arrangements to let me make online payments for my cable-TV and cable modem, my cellphone, my mortgage, my electricity, or one of my credit cards, even though Wells Fargo is seen as a leader in online payments and all the companies that I want to pay are established giants.

The online-payment idea still seems to me to work so well that I’m sure it will happen, but I guess it will take time.

As Yogi Berra once said about something in a context different from, ah, this Context, the futures of the technologies I experimented with are ahead of them.