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Tony Cassetta was speaking to an audience of die-hard corporate BlackBerry users at a conference earlier this year when he asked a taboo question: How many of you talk, text or e-mail with your BlackBerry while driving?

Slowly, most of the people in the auditorium raised their hands. Mr. Cassetta was not surprised.

"You watch their reaction and they all timidly put up their hands because it is something everybody does," said Mr. Cassetta, who is the chief operating officer of Intelligent Mechatronic Systems Inc., a Waterloo, Ont., company aiming to use technology to make driving safer.

"There are all sorts of distractions in the car, and what we're hoping to do is give people a safer alternative to the way that they're doing it today," he says. "If they have to do it and they want to do it, then they have an option of doing it safely."

Doing it safely means allowing drivers to check their e-mail and calendar without taking their eyes off the road. It sounds impossible, unless of course the device could read the e-mails to the user.

Enter the iLane.

IMS is billing the iLane as the first in-car device that allows BlackBerry users to listen to a computer reading their e-mails and calendar while controlling it through voice commands — all without taking their hands off the wheel or their eyes off the road.

The iLane, which employs wireless Bluetooth technology, lets users browse and listen to e-mails, make phone calls and reply to messages using only their voice. The user's BlackBerry detects the iLane system, which is powered by the car's cigarette lighter, through its Bluetooth settings. Users, wearing a wireless headset, speak simple commands such as "reply" or "delete" to cycle through their messages.

"We're trying to make this as natural as possible," Mr. Cassetta said.

Founded nearly a decade ago, IMS has developed a range of automotive technologies including airbags that can sense the position of a driver's head and shoulders and deploy accordingly, and GPS tracking tools that allow insurance companies and toll road operators to remotely track and measure how fast and how far a vehicle travels.

For many small enterprises, doing business on the road is a fact of life. Technology such as the iLane not only allows drivers to bring the office with them, but to do so safely, said Mr. Cassetta, who joined the board of directors at IMS in 2006; last year, the company's founder and chief executive officer, Otman Basir, tapped him to take over as COO.

One business owner who has been using the iLane as part of a trial project told Mr. Cassetta that he would often spend as long as 30 minutes at the end of a normal workday answering e-mails because he didn't want to be tempted to use his BlackBerry on his evening commute.

"He's going to change the way he does things," Mr. Cassetta said.

Other companies that employ travelling sales representatives or fleets of service crews have expressed interest in installing iLanes in their vehicles to stay in touch with teams in the field.

Although the iLane won't be officially available in Canada until next week, the recent decision by the Ontario government to introduce legislation banning the use of handheld electronic devices while driving shows just how popular IMS's technology could be for commuters in the province. Similar laws are in force or have been considered in other provinces and throughout the United States.

The iLane will be capable of reading and taking orders in English when it launches, with French and Spanish applications to follow in the coming months. Mr. Cassetta said the company's software has a 95-per-cent success rate for reading and identifying words and will even giggle if the writer has written a happy face emoticon using a semicolon and parentheses.

Users will be able to respond to e-mails with voice responses only to begin with, though the company is working on voice-to-text software for subsequent versions that will allow users to dictate written e-mails.

The company also plans to offer other voice-activated services, such as traffic and weather information, in real time through the iLane.

Given that IMS is based in Waterloo, home of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., it's no surprise that the iLane was developed to work with RIM's devices first. Versions that are compatible with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile operating system and Nokia Corp.'s Symbian platform are in the works.

Fans of Apple Inc.'s iPhone are out of luck, however, at least for now.

"At this stage, I'm not convinced that the penetration level of the iPhone warrants the amount of development effort that is required to bring it on board," Mr. Cassetta said.

"Right now our focus is on small, medium and large enterprises. Once this becomes more of a consumer device late in 2009, then I would see us working on the iPhone. It's going to be there, but it's a question of when."