Jeff Howard, IBM's worldwide OS/2 brand manager, during a meeting with Newsbytes at the show in New York City, maintained that Merlin's speech recognition will now allow for "no-hands" operation of the entire e-mail management process, including message dictation and voice commands to Notes Mail such as "open mail, send, delete, and reply."

As previously reported in Newsbytes, Merlin's speech recognition also supports navigation of both the Internet and the OS/2 and Windows desktops. Users will be able to "go to" specified home pages on the Web simply by uttering commands like "jump to 1966 Olympics home page," Howard noted, during a previous meeting with Newsbytes at the IBM Interchange developers conference in Nashville.

Howard told Newsbytes this week that because Lotus Notes Mail, the new mail component in Merlin, is a Notes Release 4.1 client, with support for both POP3 and MIME, users will be able to apply the spoken commands to mail from either Notes or the Internet. With Notes Mail, Lotus is replacing the Notes Express client, the IBM exec pointed out.

Merlin and Notes Mail provide a number of other capabilities geared to ease of use, especially from on the road, according to the OS/2 brand manager.

A new task manager in Notes Mail, for example, will let you create and manage "to do" lists, assign tasks remotely to coworkers, and keep an eye on your colleagues' progress.

Notes Mail also allows for "single-click" designation of users' mobile locations, communications methods, access codes, and levels of access, Newsbytes was told. Users can decide to view full messages, complete with attachments; message headers, plus the first few parts of messages; or message headers only.

In addition, a new "mailbox replication tool" in Notes Mail is designed for automatic synchronization between Notes messages on a remote PC, such as a laptop, and those stored on a LAN.

Notes Mail will also include a full-featured word processing editor, with multiple fonts, colors, and a number of different formatting options.

The new mail system's "type-ahead e-mail addressing" capability will automatically fill in the name of the recipient after recognizing the first few characters typed in by the user.

Also, for e-mail privacy, OS/2 Warp will include a new "For Your Eyes Only" icon aimed at preventing a message from being seen by anyone other than the recipient. By clicking on the icon, you can disable the printing, forward, cut, copy, and paste functions, and enable the recipient to reply only to the sender, according to Howard.

The brand manager added that Merlin's recent entrance into beta represented the first time in IBM history that all available slots in a beta program were filled even before the program was officially announced. Users in the US applied to be among the testers by filling out a form on IBM's home page on the Web.

Merlin is now being beta tested by a total of 10,000 users worldwide, including 3,000 in Europe, Newsbytes was told.

(Jacqueline Emigh/19960621/Reader Contact: IBM, 914-765-1900; Press Contact: Joseph Stunkard, IBM, 512-838-9642; Norman Birnbach, Brodeur & Partners for IBM, 617-622-2866)