Business Notes Telecommunications

Next time a stranded friend calls collect, the familiar phrase "Will you accept the charges?" could have a distinctly different sound. Last week AT&T announced that it will replace as many as a third of its 18,000 long-distance operators by 1994 with a computerized voice system. Known as voice-recognition technology, it will handle calls made collect or person-to-person as well as those billed to a third party.

AT&T boasts that the automated system will offer consumers "more choice in how they make long-distance calls." But the Communications Workers of America, which represents telephone operators, begs to differ. "This decision represents a drastic change in what people have come to expect in customer service," says spokeswoman Gaye Williams Mack. "They need a service that is best provided by human beings."

Whatever the truth of that assertion, technological advances have taken a heavy toll on U.S. telephone operators over the years. Their number has dwindled from nearly 250,000 to just 70,000 since AT&T introduced direct-dial long-distance service in the early 1950s.