Voice portals, reputedly the next boom industry in the world of the web, are the technophobe's dream come true. Imagine: you can get up-to-the-minute information from the internet just by picking up your phone anywhere, any time. No more fiddling with a temperamental mouse. No more twiddling your thumbs as your server cranks into gear. You would not even have to know how to use a computer.

Several companies have launched voice portals in the US in the past two months, including, BeVocal, Quack, TellMe and Audiopoint, and the trend is due to hit Britain in about a year. They use speech recognition technology to get information from the web and "speak" it to you down your phone line. All you do is dial a freephone number and ask for what you want.

You cannot just surf the web, but you can find out cinema times, check your stock portfolio or listen to the latest headline news. You can call up travel information before you leave the office, or get driving directions when you are lost. You can choose and book a restaurant table, and hear film or book reviews, or your horoscope. All straight off the web. All without touching a computer.

Experts are predicting massive growth: the Kelsey Group, a market analyst firm, estimates that in five years, 18 million consumers will be using some kind of speech recognition portal.

Voice portals have been possible because of advances in two crucial technologies: speech recognition software (from companies such as Lucent, Nuance and Speechworks) can now understand natural speech in a wide range of accents and diction without having to be trained to a specific voice. And new standards such as VoiceXML are beginning to make it as easy to write voice services as HTML did to write web pages.

With VoiceXML, your voice takes the place of a mouse and your spoken command is like a click. You cannot call up conventional web pages, but you can access information that has been specially composed for the phone: sound clips, music or text spoken by the computer (in a Stephen Hawking voice).

The bad news is that the big bucks will come from advertising. The Kelsey Group predicts that advertising revenues on voice portals will reach $17 billion in 2005. So does this mean that when you ring to check whether there's a traffic jam on your route home, you will have to endure 10 minutes of Pamper's ads? I am based in the US, so decided to get a taste of what Britain will be in for.

I started with Tellme, the most hyped 'V-commerce' firm and reputedly the best. Using the service is so simple, even the most tech-terrified could do it. Instructions - in a real human voice, rather than anything scary and automated - are clear and repeated often frequently. It understood my British accent without a glitch and in less than two minutes I had narrowed my restaurant search to 10 Vietnamese eateries in the area I wanted. I heard a couple of reviews, with gradings for service, decor and food, and when I had picked one, Tellme connected me directly to it, so I could book there and then. The ads were unobtrusive (though this could change as the service expands) and it only asked me, grovelling apologetically, to repeat myself once.

Others - I tried four more - were also generally easy, though, as you would expect during a roll-out period, the information available varied. Audiopoint, which allows you to customise its service, gave quick, and surprisingly comprehensive, information on current travel problems in my area. BeVocal was the exception: after it had asked me four times at the start for my phone number ("I did not understand you"), I hung up in irritation.

Simplicity is, in fact, the selling point of voice portals, perhaps because people have less patience on the phone than at their terminals: "I wanted to build something that my mom would use," says Michael McCue, Tellme's chief executive. The everyday consumer who is fed up with technology angst and the complexity that has come about from the rise of the internet can still use the net."

With 1.7 billion telephones in the world, McCue's potential market is certainly capacious. This is why most companies are trying to give themselves a particular spin: Tellme's speciality is dining suggestions. With TelSurf you can read and send email over the phone. And BeVocal claims to be the last word in road directions.

But it is not clear whether the technology will work as well with millions of users as it does with a few thousand. Also, it won't be free if you're on a mobile phone - probably when you will need a voice portal the most. It is no wonder that British mobile operators like Orange, Vodafone and One2One are rumoured to be developing voice portals of their own.

But the race for British custom is on. Tellme expects to launch in Britain by the end of 2001 and Audiopoint, which launched in the US last week, is "talking to people in Europe". So next time you're grappling with the yellow pages, watching your PC crash, take comfort: voice portals are on their way.