It could take a tiny talking pill bottle to finally broker peace between pharmacists and consumers.

	Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette Chris Spencer, chief executive officer of Oakland-based Wizzard Software, holds "Rex," a medicine bottle that verbally identifies what's inside. Click photo for larger image.

"Rex" is a pill bottle that looks like any other prescription medicine that may litter any household bathroom -- plastic orange cylinder and requisite white cap. The difference: Rex's human voice tells you what prescription is inside and how to take it, decreasing the risk of error.

Rex is multilingual too, which could help reduce the numbers of non-English speakers in the United States who get sick because they can't read the labels.

That may thrill consumer advocates, Big Pharma and the medical industry, but Chris Spencer would also like to turn a profit. Spencer is chief executive officer of the company that owns Rex, Oakland-based Wizzard Software.

He and his partner, Armen Geronian, today announced the purchase of Pittsford, N.Y.-based MedivoxRx, which manufactures the pill bottles. Currently, pharmacists who want to use Rex have to dictate prescriptions into a tiny microphone, and they don't like that. Wizzard is creating a means of bypassing dictation and instead typing instructions into a computer.

The deal is the first in a series that Spencer and Geronian hope will put Wizzard in the black.

Armed with $1.2 million, Wizzard has been eyeing more acquisitions. "They have to be the right companies" said Spencer. "We're not going on a buying spree."

Self-taught computer programmers Spencer, 34, and Geronian, 35, met in the early 1990s and had some success with their early entrepreneurial efforts, Lottery USA, a lottery ticket purchasing service, and China Wire, a money transfer service to Chinese cities.

It wasn't until the ebullient Spencer bumped into speech recognition technology at an industry trade show in 1995 that the company found its niche -- enabling people to have conversations with their computers.

Using technology developed by IBM and AT&T, Wizzard develops voice-interactive computer applications and technical support for anyone who asks. Indeed, Wizzard's customer list stretches beyond talking medicines -- its projects range from creating a voice-operated money order scanner for the U.S. Postal Service to the "Digiwx", an interactive weather report for pilots of small planes.

"It's just a matter of time when speech recognition will become very popular and people will be talking to the computer instead of typing one key at a time," said Geronian, the company's chief technologist.

Wizzard has been helped by IBM and ATT, which have sent customers their way. IBM and ATT have developed speech technology, and Wizzard has helped disseminate it to the public.

In 1996, Wizzard introduced its first product, "Voice E-mail" a software package allowing users to send e-mail by talking to their computers, rather than typing. The program attracted attention but not much revenue. "The technology was not as advanced then," said Spencer. "People just wanted it to work without the glitches."

Their next effort, the Interactive Voice Assistant, an application allowing computer users to dictate letters to Microsoft Word or surf the Web simply by talking to it, fared better. It did so well that in 2001, after five years, the company went public in a back door offering on the OTC Bulletin Board, using the remains of a Utah company that sold motivational seminars and books. The ride has been bumpy since, with Wizzard trading as low as 37 cents last summer. Its close yesterday of $1.74, up a quarter, is its highest since the spring of 2002.

After the MedivoxRx buyout, Spencer and Geronian plan to expand production of these medicine bottles from several hundred a year to over a million a year in just a few months. By marketing the talking pill bottles to pharmacies and drug stores nationwide, they are hoping to revolutionize the way people take their medicine.