AT&T; Will Cut Up to a Third of Its Operators : Communications: About 150 will be laid off in Anaheim as the company replaces as many as 6,000 with a voice-recognition system that can place collect calls.

In the broadest application yet of an infant technology, American Telephone & Telegraph said Tuesday that it will replace up to a third of its operators with a voice-recognition system that can place collect calls.

AT&T; said the new system, tested for several months last year in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, will “keep the costs of calling reasonable.” But the company did not provide estimates of how much it expects to save by replacing 3,000 to 6,000 of its operators between now and December, 1994.

The layoffs include about 150 operators and other employees at AT&T;’s office in Anaheim.

AT&T; said it decided to implement the voice-recognition system nationally after receiving a good response in its Dallas test market. According to the company, four of five people who used the new system rated it “good” or “excellent.”

But Los Angeles telecommunications consultant Lauren Weinstein predicted that AT&T; will have problems with the system, at least initially. “Tests are limited situations. Once deployed in the real world, they are going to find people are confused.”

AT&T; has been a leader in the development of the technology in which a computer is trained to recognized and respond to certain words. Last year, International Business Machines Corp. announced a computer that could recognize speech, but the technology hasn’t been applied on a broad scale. Acceptance of the AT&T; system could bring voice recognition to a host of other communications and electronic devices.

AT&T; said the voice-recognition system technology will handle many long-distance calls currently handled by operators. For example, when the caller dials “O” and the number, he or she will receive a prompt to say “collect.” As the call goes through, a recorded voice asks the person called to say “yes” to accept the charges.

At any time, the caller can say the word “operator,” and a human operator will come on the line, AT&T; said. An operator also will come on if a caller appears to be having trouble.

While several of the regional telephone systems have tried voice-recognition, none of the long-distance carriers has attempted it. A spokesman for MCI said Tuesday that the nation’s second-largest long-distance telephone company has looked at such a system, but has no plans to implement it.

Weinstein said voice-recognition systems can be tricky.

“Suppose someone says, ‘I don’t know,’ instead of ‘no.’ The system will hang up,” Weinstein said.

The Communications Workers of America reacted bitterly to the system. Along with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, it represents most of the employees affected by the new technology.

In a statement, CWA President Morton Bahr accused AT&T; of implementing the system before testing had been completed as a scare tactic in contract negotiations, slated to begin the end of this month. AT&T; said it will offer jobs, training and up to 104 weeks’ severance pay to displaced workers.

“It means jobs. It stinks,” said Ken Majors, an official with CWA District 9 in Burlingame, representing California, Hawaii and Nevada. He predicted that consumers who have grown weary of electronic voice mail will be unhappy with the new system. “People are tired of talking to machines.”

Major said about 2,000 employees will be affected by the announced closing of AT&T; operator offices in Anaheim, Burbank, City of Commerce, Redwood City and Santa Rosa. Nationwide, AT&T; said it will close 21 of its 31 operator offices.