AT&T Premieres Real Time IM Relay for Customers With Hearing and Speech Loss

DALLAS, Sept. 28 --For people with hearing and speech loss, communicating with callers who can speak and hear just went real time, thanks to AT&T and AOL's AIM instant messaging service. Customers using AT&T IM Relay services now have a new, faster feature at their fingertips: AT&T Real Time IM. AT&T is the first and only provider to offer the new real time feature -- offering more than 31 million people with hearing and speech loss, nationwide, a more immediate way to communicate with standard telephone users.

Users log in to a specialized AIM interface that works with an Internet connection on a PC and on many wireless devices. A specially-trained relay operator reads IMs to hearing callers and types IMs which are displayed -- in real time -- to the end user. The new service is offered at no additional charge to customers who register with AT&T Relay Services.

With the new real time IM feature, instead of waiting for the relay operator to type a full phrase or sentence, IM users can see the text messages they are receiving, word-by-word as they are typed -- making conversations feel more like calls experienced by hearing customers.

"To hearing users, this may sound like a trivial enhancement," said Claude Stout, Executive Director, TDI. "But for many callers with hearing or speech disabilities, this creates a wireless and online communications experience that is much closer to what hearing people encounter when talking with others on the phone. TDI applauds such collaboration between industry players that results in greater functional equivalency for deaf and hard of hearing consumers."