Voice Portal   One of the most important developments of recent years has been that of "voice portals." A voice portal is a website that you can call on the phone to request information – and receive it in return – by voice. Voice portals offer a range of content including news, sports scores, stock quotes, traffic reports and weather. They are an important development because they marry the benefits of voice-based access with the Internet. As an example, quick retrieval of information is easy by voice, because a user can simply state an item stored in a list or directory, without having to scroll through a menu or listen to each option. Most services use voice recognition software to understand the callers' requests. The site responds with prerecorded audio, robotic text-to-speech, or concatenated speech, putting prerecorded words together into sentences. There are far more telephone users in the world than computer users (some 800 million wireless phone users and 1.2 billion telephone lines, compared with 300 million computer-based Internet users). Recent market reports predict that voice portals will be one of the fastest growing and most widely used Internet technologies, given their ability to make Web content and services far more accessible - one forecast was that by 2005 voice portals will become a US$26 billion market. NTT Communications (NTT Com) launched its own XML-based voice portal service, "V-Portal" ("V" meaning "Value" and "Variety" as well as "Voice") in January 2002.