Will Wall Street lend an ear to voice technology?

With the words "zap it!" a television watcher will command his TV to mute pesky commercials. But is the voice-recognition technology that makes this work in the laboratory now ready for consumers, or Wall Street?

Next week a Canoga Park developer of voice-recognition technology may test the credibility of itself and the budding industry with a scheduled $5.5 million public stock offering.

Owners of Voice Powered Technology International Inc. plan to sell the public a 25 percent stake to raise money to fuel development, marketing and various start-up costs. Some 1.3 million units will be offered for $4.00-$4.50 per unit, each consisting of stock, warrants and cumulative preferred stock.

The outfit will take the plunge, underwritten by Santa Monica-based Drake Capital Securities, despite some clear weaknesses: It has no prior sales, and has racked up $4.2 million in losses since it was founded nearly three years ago, while key patents on its products are merely pending, not issued.

Those factors prompted a major rival underwriting official last month to question just how "real" the company was, suggesting his firm would shun the deal: "We don't take 'concepts' public," said the source, asking not to be named.

Officials at Drake and at Voice Powered Technology could not defend themselves last week, being mostly restricted by the Securities and Exchange Commission in comments they make to the media.

But their stock prospectus has generated interest, beginning with the color photo of a remote-control "programmer" that responds to voice and is designed to replace the remotes for TVs, VCRs and cable-TV boxes in 50 million American households.

"It looks like a well-designed, well-thought-through product," said John Oberteuffer, president of a market-research firm called Voice Information Associates Inc. in Lexington, Mass. Although Oberteuffer hadn't lab-tested its product, he said Voice Powered Technology is unique among the industry: "Others have done consumer products, but this one has the potential to go mass-market."

Yet skepticism abounds on when voice technology will truly hit the streets.

"Voice (technology) has not taken over the world because, to my knowledge, it's not very effective yet," said Bruce Lupatkin, managing director of technical research at high-tech venture capital firm Hambrecht & Quist Inc. in San Francisco.

IBM has researched the technology for 20 years but still introduced no major product for the general market. "We feel the technology really hasn't been up to IBM's standards," said John Osmundsen, spokesman for IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

Because speech is so idiosyncratic among different people, "the recognition isn't high enough," he said. "If you're 92-percent accurate, you're still making a lot of mistakes."

Still, industry sources said look for IBM and others to demonstrate such gadgets next month at the Comdex computer convention in Las Vegas. There automatic speech-recognition equipment may begin to break further out of its shell.

Buyers dished out only about $160 million last year for products that transfer speech to text, to computer files, to electronic commands that control equipment and the like, estimated Oberteuffer's research firm. Nevertheless, it projected the sector will grow to about $575 million by 1995.

Although IBM and other computer-tech titans like Texas Instruments and Motorola are involved to varying degrees, the companies primarily devoted to the technology are few, small and very private.

Ten-year-old Dragon Systems Inc. of Newton, Mass. -- whose system is said to recognize word commands for controlling software applications like word-processing -- is considered a leader by industry sources. It has just 85 employees and doesn't disclose revenues.

Kurzweil Applied Intelligence of Waltham, Mass., with about 90 employees, has plans to go public and raise about $20 million, said a Kurzweil source.

The only public company, Scott Instruments Corp. of Ft. Worth, Texas, employs 22 and posted just $2 million in revenues last year. Products are directed to the telecommunication and computer users -- not consumers.

The Canoga Park company, however, has two more consumer-oriented products in the works. One is a "Voice Reminder." You issue instructions, like "Call Anne on Tuesday, at 3 p.m.," and it automatically alerts you to that message at the specified time, according to the company. The other product does the same, plus recalls phone numbers when prompted by a spoken name.

These are not so unique, said Oberteuffer, who also published a newsletter on voice technology. "I'd be surprised if they didn't have competitors by the time they bring these to the market," he speculated.

Industry officials say voice-technology products are definitely coming, but first for very specialized uses, such as law and medicine. Eventually, said Osmundsen, "You really will be talking to your televisions and home appliances, and gesturing to them too."