I recently attended a wedding where, rather than using expensive, stamped RSVP cards, my friends Boots and Evelyn had their guests communicate their replies online.  While some may balk at the non-traditional, arguably non-romantic method of tallying the number of wedding guests, the advantages are obvious:

• no postage ($0.37 x hundreds of guests = $$$ that could be spent on more wine at the reception)
• no expensive stationery (again, more wine! AND you save trees)
• no fear of lost replies in the mail
• immediate tally of guests
• no manual counting of hundreds of little reply cards
• you can check the tally from any connected computer

Their web-based reservation system got me thinking that this would make a decent speech application.  Imagine a Wedding.com or some such outfit deploying a speech application that lets people search for a wedding by date, city-state, or name.  (If the number of weddings got to be so large that accuracy became a problem, the grammars could be constrained by month, state, etc.)  The application could then offer any or all of the following:

• general information on the wedding: when, where, etc.
• allow guests to RSVP - guestlists could be uploaded ahead of time to create the grammar.  If that doesn't work, guests can record their names.  The application could solicit whatever information is necessary: number of guests, choice of entree (btw, never get the chicken at weddings).
• gift registries (sometimes you're out running errands when you remember you need to pick up a wedding gift, but you can't remember where your friends are registered.)  If the registry stores had their own speech-based retail applications, you could even purchase the wedding gift by phone!
• audio "guest book" that lets guests record short little messages for the couple

Here's the clincher - the application could call those guests who haven't replied by a certain date and get the RSVP information.  The reminder call can begin with a brief message recorded by the couple: "We really hope you can make it to Seattle next month for our wedding.  We're very excited to see you!"  Now calling people on the phone is pretty intrusive, especially when the calling party is an automated system, but I suspect most people would be happy to get such a reminder call.

Have I drunk too much of the Speech Kool-Aid for thinking this would be a cool, useful application?