AT&T Premieres Real Time IM Relay

October 2009

Editor: As the various kinds of relay services continue to expand, AT&T announces their services that runs over AOL's instant messaging service, which folks with hearing loss can access using their mobile devices. Here's the announcement from the folks at AT&T.

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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(r) instant messaging service. Customers using AT&T IM Relay services now have a new, faster feature at their fingertips: AT&T Real Time IM. -With the service, AT&T offers 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."

TDI recently honored AT&T with the 2009 James C. Marsters Promotion Award for providing innovative products and services that address the needs of people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

To access the service, using an Internet connection and an AIM account, AT&T IM Relay users can IM the phone number they're calling to the screen name "attrelay." AT&T IM Relay customers are assigned a typical 10-digit phone number, like any other wireless or landline customer, that others can use to contact them.