France’s First Rally Results On-the-Fly deployed by Patrick Soft with BrightSpeech: France’s Patrick Soft is specialized in posting Car and Karting Rally & Racing Results, Classifications, Calendars, Racing License Requests, and much more. For their real-time result service, they have decided to use "Julie", Babel’s BrightSpeech French for instant access to results over the phone. Race amateurs or anyone with access to a phone can now listen in on immediate rankings, classifications, and much more while they are away or unable to connect to a PC for these results. BrightSpeech allows database reading in real-time. Moreover, the dictionary module has proven to be especially significant because of its flexibility in adapting the pronunciation of certain proper names. Patrick Soft is the first and only French provider of such a brand-new approach towards nation-wide. www.patricksoft.fr www.babeltech.com Isabel Meurisse Babel Technologies +32 65 374 174 meurisse@babeltech.com
First Citizen’s Bank of Trinidad & Tobago offers Telephone Banking with Computer Talk Technology System: Computer Talk Technology (CTT) Inc.( Toronto, Ontario, Canada) will equip First Citizens Bank (FCB) to offer fully automated telephone banking services with its all-in-one contact center solution, ice3. FCB will deploy ice3 to direct calls in its 24 agent call center, as well as two specialized, embedded ice3 features: iceVoice and iceCampaign. iceVoice will provide fully automated telephone banking options, and iceCampaign will perform outbound marketing campaigns and customer call backs. iceVoice will let FCB's customers carry out such transactions as bill payments, money transfers, and account reviews, over the phone at any time of day. iceCampaign equips inbound, outbound or blended contact centers to run lead generation, promotions, and customer service campaigns. FCB marks CTT's second major Caribbean installation; last year a CTT voice solution was deployed for TSTT, Trinidad and Tobago's largest telecommunications company. ice3 is a fully embedded multi-channel communication tool that allows contact centers to focus on customer care without worrying about technology distinctions and product integration. Embedded features, including self-serve IVR and speech recognition, CTI, VoIP, e-mail, web chat, conversation recording, and campaign management, can be activated when needed. Users can respond to changing business needs in real-time with ice3's reporting and administration capabilities. FCB is a financial services provider renowned for innovativeness, customer service and financial prudence. www.computer-talk.com contact: Greg Blackett, Director of Marketing, Computer Talk Technology Inc., Tel: 905-882-5000, Ext. 128, 1-800-410-1051 gblackett@icescape.com
DST Retirement Solutions Provides Speaker VerificationTechnology Saves Plan Providers Money and Improves Customer Satisfaction: DST Retirement Solutions (Kansas City, MO) has added speaker verification ("voice print") capabilities to its TRAC recordkeeping platform. TRAC enables defined contribution plan participants to use their voices to access secured functions instead of entering their numeric personal identification numbers (PINs). Speaker verification provides greater security than conventional PIN technology, is easier and more convenient for participants to use, and decreases phone time and administrative costs for providers. Speaker verification relies on biometric technology to identify callers based on characteristics of each caller's unique vocal patterns. The first time callers use the system, they speak their security information into the telephone; their voice prints are held in a secure database and are accessed for verification when the callers later make account inquiries. The system employs "natural language speech recognition," which allows it to recognize general, naturally flowing speech. Unlike PINs, which can be forgotten or stolen, speaker verification provides participants a more secure solution. Because the technology relies upon physical characteristics of the actual individual calling, not simply data associated with an individual, speaker verification provides more robust security and fraud protection than other forms of identification. Providers realize reduced call times and associated costs as participants navigate more quickly through the account inquiry application, speaking their verification and other requests rather than waiting for touch-tone prompting. In addition, providers no longer need to allocate staff and resources to reset forgotten PINs. DST Retirement Solutions provides recordkeeping, administrative and communications technology and support to the defined contribution marketplace. Offering two distinct service models -- flexible outsourcing and ASP -- DST Retirement Solutions is a single source for all phases of a defined contribution operation. With 3.2 million participants representing 37 major institutional clients, DST Retirement Solutions supports all plan types, sizes and investment options. DST Systems, Inc. (NYSE: DST - News) provides sophisticated information processing and computer software services and products that help clients improve productivity, increase efficiencies, and provide higher levels of customer service. DST is organized into three operating segments: Financial Services, Customer Management, and Output Solutions. www.dstsystems.com Contact: Jill Metzler, jdmetzler@dstsystems.com 816-843-9087, Jim Walsh, director of DST Retirement Solutions
Météo France Using Elan Speech SaySo for Weather: Météo France, the French meteorology organisation, has chosen Elan Sayso's TTS to read out the sea weather forecasts, flight condition information or weather alerts, available over the phone 24-7. Météo France had already adopted speech synthesis long ago, as an efficient way to enable, automate, and guarantee access to ever up-to-date information, and is now enriching its services with Elan Sayso. The Météo Marine sea weather forecast service for the French atlantic coast, or flight conditions for amateur pilots were already speech-enabled by Elan Speech technology. By upgrading to Elan Sayso, Météo France goes one step futher than simple intelligibility, to reach a result that has never been closer to a human voice. The quality of the services themselves is also enhanced by this change : Untill now, the bulletins were all recorded by different agents. With Elan Sayso, Météo France has created a homogenous service using the same clear and intelligible voice, for easier listening and quality services. The quality of Elan Sayso technology convinced Météo France to use it to complete its alert service and automate the processing of the weather alert bulletins outside of the regional offices' opening hours. Therefore, with Elan Sayso technology, unexpected and exceptional weather conditions can be taken into account by any Météo France agent via a simple keyboard. The information is instantly added to the database to be read out in real time by the speech synthesis system, with no recording needed. Meteo France's main mission, which is to monitor the atmospherical conditions to forecast all possible risks for the security of the population, requires the most reliable technology and full control of information from production to processing on a national scale. www.meteo.fr www.elanspeech.com/demos/sayso.htm Contact: Caroline Houel, Elan Speech +33 (0)5 62 24 71 22 chouel@elanspeech.com Météo France, Stephane Cottonea (33) 1 45 56 71 71
Elan Speech voice-enables Eliott, SANEF's automatic traffic information assistant, for real-time traffic information broadcast on a French Motorway radio station: SANEF (Société des Autoroutes du Nord et de l'Est de la France), designer and operator of motorway infrastructures, toll equipment, traffic management and Telecoms, has chosen Elan Speech, to voice-enable Eliott, its automated traffic information assistant, on the French traffic radio, 107.7 FM. The Eliott service handles, on the 11pm-6am time slot, the continuity of real-time traffic information broadcast on 107.7 radio. An on-call radio presenter deals with any exceptional incidents. With Eliott, SANEF has launched a regular traffic information radio system to use an automated information service. This new service is responsible for broadcasting and commenting upon real-time traffic information. By using speech synthesis, SANEF ensures 24-7 availability and guarantees that the information broadcast after working hours is reliable to provide better and safer driving conditions. Elan's text to speech was tuned by the SANEF team to meet the specific requirements in terms of traffic vocabulary. The contents of the messages are designed to be completely versatile to make sure the announcements are as intelligible as possible for the drivers travelling on the SANEF network. Thanks to Eliott, SANEF preserves the Traffic Management Center operators' main activities. They can now stay focused on event management without being burdened with extra tasks. SANEF was recently awarded a 'technology toll excellence award' by the IBTTA ('International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association'). www.sanef.com www.elanspeech.com/demos/sayso.htm Contact: Caroline Houel, Elan Speech +33 (0)5 62 24 71 22 chouel@elanspeech.com Jean-Luc Pierrepont, in charge of SANEF Traffic Management, 01 44 38 62 00
GAO Report: Technology Investments by Premera Blue Cross Save Millions; Improve Service and Quality of Care: A new U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) report describes how Premera Blue Cross (Mountainlake Terrace, WA) technology investments help physicians deliver better quality care to patients, improve customer service and moderate the rising cost of health care. The October 2003 GAO report is intended to assess how the health-care industry takes advantage of information technology. The GAO report described efforts by 10 health-care delivery organizations and three U.S. health insurers, including Premera Blue Cross, to improve quality, enhance service and reduce costs. "Premera has invested heavily in technologies to better capture, cleanse, and manage information in order to assist in the facilitation of quality care at the most effective cost," according to the GAO report, which was completed in accordance with generally accepted government accounting standards. Premera's uses of the following technologies were cited in the GAO report: Premera's Polypharmacy Program, a pharmacy education and safety program that uses a database technology to search for members who use five or more medications to treat chronic conditions. Premera then sends letters that encourage members to bring all their medications to their next doctor's appointment so the physician can review the member's drug therapy. After doing so, 27 percent of Premera's members reported a change in their prescribed medications -- either a change in dose, or an addition or deletion of a medication. ELIZA - advanced speech-recognition technology, in which a computer calls members on the telephone to provide health-screening reminders or conduct surveys. The computer application simulates a human voice and anticipates and replies to specific answers. Reminder calls made using Eliza technology were not only 10 to 30 percent less costly than calls made by live operators, they also contributed to increases in diabetic eye exams and adolescent immunizations. Since 2000, diabetic retinal eye exams increased from 71 to 93 percent and the number of children fully immunized by age 13 increased from 29 to 43 percent. Interactive voice response (IVR) systems, which intelligently route calls and provide 24-hour self-service response to members and providers. The system reduces call volumes to live agents, with about 15 percent of calls handled with the IVR, and provides members with continuous automated access to their data by phone. Automated Call Distributors route calls to the first available and most experienced agent. The system improves customer service, increases the rate of one-call problem resolution, tracks call volume and call handling statistics, and provides a more consistent customer call experience, better service, and call tracking. www.gao.gov/new.items/d04224.pdf. Premera Blue Cross provides health insurance and related services to more than 1.2 million people in Washington and Alaska. Premera Blue Cross has operated in Washington since 1933, and Alaska since 1957. Premera Blue Cross is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. Premera Blue Cross www.elizacorp.com Contact: Eliza, (978) 921-2700 info@elizacorp.com Scott Forslund, 425-918-5070 office 800-345-4959 pager or Chris Jarvis, 425-918-3368 office 800-246-8516 pager, Alan Smit, Premera's senior vice president and chief technology officer
Michigan Department of Treasury Automates Customer Service During 2003 Tax Season With Intervoice Speech-Enabled System: The Michigan Department of Treasury handled over 1.4 million phone calls during the 2003 tax season from January to June with its speech-enabled system from Intervoice, Inc. (Nasdaq: INTV) which reflects a two-fold increase over last year in the number of taxpayers served. Designed to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of self-service channels for Michigan taxpayers, the Intervoice system reduced the number of calls handled by live agents for the state tax agency by 30 percent. The project was completed and fully deployed in the Company's fiscal year ending February 28, 2002. Supplying financial, tax and administrative services to Michigan citizens, the Michigan Department of Treasury received 4.5 million tax returns in 2003. The Treasury Department's Computerized Return Information System (CRIS) from Intervoice met the demands of abundant incoming calls, off-loaded redundant inquiries and provided customer service seven days a week, 24 hours a day. The state's automated system provides callers with the ability to simply speak their requests without having to listen to traditional touch-tone menus or interact with customer service representatives. Callers' inquiries are thereby expedited while call durations and associated costs are reduced. Four speech-enabled applications are currently deployed: -- Current-Year Return-Status - Taxpayers can check on their individual return status. -- Estimated Payments - Taxpayers can verify estimated payments. -- Prior-Year Returns - Taxpayers can inquire about return information from previous years. -- Pre-recorded Tax Tips - Taxpayers can obtain information toward the two self service options, allowing the call center to handle the most complex calls. www.intervoice.com Contact: Stephanie Leonard, stephanie.leonard@intervoice.com 972-454-8231, Stephen Hilker, CPA, Director of the Michigan Department of Treasury's Customer Service Center.
Kirusa announces a multimodal trial with mobilkom austria mobilkom austria evaluates Multimodality using Kirusa's multimodal platform: Kirusa (Edison, NJ) has launched Austria’s first trial of multimodality with mobilkom austria, the mobile venture of Telekom Austria (NYSE:TKA), and the market leader for mobile telephony in Austria, with more than 3 million customers, and a market share of 43,5%. During the trial, several multimodal applications based on Kirusa’s multimodal platform will be evaluated by mobilkom austria. mobilkom austria group provides wireless services in Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Liechtenstein. mobilkom austria is developing and testing several SMS and sequential multimodal applications as a part of the trial, for use over standard SMS and WAP handsets. Kirusa's multimodal platform, offering SMS, sequential, and simultaneous multimodality, enables wireless phone and PDA users to request or add information by speaking a command, or by using visual inputs such as typing or tapping with a stylus. Application results can be delivered visually on the device screen, by voice, or through innovative combinations of both voice and visual modes. Kirusa’s platform supports both the Speech Application Language Tags (SALT), and the X+V (based on VoiceXML) specifications for multimodal application development, allowing speech and multimodal capabilities to be easily added to mobile applications for improved usability and reduced task completion time. Simultaneous multimodal applications allowing users to use both voice and visual interactions at the same time can be developed and deployed for numerous smart devices, including those based on platforms such as Microsoft’s SmartPhone, Symbian (e.g. Nokia’s Series 60 and Symbian OS Version 7), Qualcomm’s BREW, PalmOS, and Microsoft’s PocketPC. +1 (732) 623-2118 www.kirusa.com mobilkom austria was founded in 1996, and since then has remained Telekom Austria Group’s most successful venture. In the first half year of 2003, mobilkom austria group counted 4,57 million customers and 3643 employees – bringing in revenue of 973,2 million EUR. Contact: Inderpal Singh Mumick, Kirusa, Inc, mumick@kirusa.com +1 732 623-2118 Gernot Stammler, Technical Solutions Manager for Voice Enabler at mobilkom austria
Orion Telecommunications Selects Metaphor Solutions To Lower Call Center Costs And Enhance Customer Service Quality With Its Speech Interactive Voice Response: Metaphor Solutions (Wellesley, MA), has been selected by Orion Telecommunications Corp. (OTC), one of the largest providers of international and domestic pre-paid calling cards in the U.S., to provide automated speech IVR applications for Orion's call centers. Metaphor's speech IVR applications will be phased in to provide customer service automation for all of Orion's calling card product lines. Orion is transitioning to automated speech IVR applications in order to significantly reduce their call center operating expenses, while providing one of the industry's highest quality standards for customer service. Metaphor's applications are intended to ensure a pleasant, consistent and easy-to-use combination of touch-tone and speech dialog with Orion customers for answers to frequently asked questions, to report problems and to apply for automatic credit on problem calls. Orion is in a very competitive and customer service centric business. Reducing internal costs while keeping high standards of service is a high priority. Orion selected Metaphor Solutions for their customer service needs after a competitive process involving a number of alternative solutions including off-shore labor. Metaphor's packaged speech IVR solutions provide a combination of high caller service quality, fast implementation and low price. With the evolution of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), OTC has strategically implemented and deployed a domestic and international network targeting the largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the USA and over 200 international countries blanketing Latin America, South America, India, Asia and Europe. Metaphor Solutions is able to provide these packaged speech applications using the Metaphor Conversation Manager (MCM). Besides automating the speech dialog with callers, MCM integrates interfaces with all the most popular data sources and data services. In the event of call transfers to live agents, MCM also provides screen pops of the accumulated data to the agents. The caller interface is achieved through Voice XML and SALT gateways that connect to enterprise switches and telephone network. Orion Telecommunications Corp. is one of the largest providers of international and domestic prepaid calling cards in the U.S., providing access from the U.S. to more than 200 countries. Based on the strong sales and distribution experience of the company founders, Orion has grown very rapidly. Since commencing operations in 1997, the company has increased monthly revenues by more than 70 times in only six years of operation. All of the growth has been organic. Orion leveraged the sales of several billion minutes per year to acquire in-house switching capabilities and has developed proprietary processes to improve primary carrier rates, which have worked to significantly lower the cost-per-minute expenses. Orion has also installed and developed their own circuit-switched network (36 STX switches/80.000 simultaneous calls) to support existing business. Orion rates are significantly lower than rates for international calls that are charged by major facilities-based carriers, giving them a significant marketing edge. www.oriontelcorp.com www.metaphorsol.com Contact: Christine Shock, Shock PR, Inc., 508-893-9933, cshock@shockpr.com Michael Kuperstein, Metaphor Solutions, 781-239-0137, michael@metaphorsol.com Orion Telecommunications, (718) 631-5600, Robert Stewart, CFO for Orion Telecommunications Corp
Cima Systems Selects Voicetext to Power Advanced Phone System for Auto Dealers: Cima Systems(Pleasanton, CA) has selected NeoSpeech's ((Fremont, CA) Text-to-Speech product, VoiceText, to power its advanced phone system for auto dealers. Cima Systems' interactive communications software combines automated data mining with voice and email messaging to automate communication with customers via phone and the Web. VoiceText automates the phone component, enabling dealerships to effortlessly send outbound calls to customers based on appointments made, services scheduled or promotions launched. By dynamically generating customer names and other specific information, NeoSpeech's VoiceText helps differentiate Cima's product. Dealerships can deliver highly personalized reminders, notifications and messages to their customer base by phone, email or text messages. By providing this level of automated, intelligent communications, Cima helps dealerships increase customer contact, customer satisfaction and sales, while drastically lowering overhead and expenses. Cima combines interactive technology with scheduling, marketing, client survey and communications applications. The system proactively mines an auto dealership's dealer management system (DMS) for relevant customer, contact and sales/service information such as recall notices, service appointments and lease terminations on a daily basis. Cima then automatically creates service or marketing messages, converting data elements into speech or personalized emails. It sends these customized, targeted sales or service promotions online, over the phone or via e-mail, on the days and times the dealer sets. Dealership customers can schedule or cancel appointments any time, day or night, by phone or the web. If a customer does cancel an appointment without rescheduling, the system automatically contacts them by phone to reschedule for another day. San Leandro Honda claims that by using Cima's automated system, they are able to reach twice as many customers a day for a fraction of the price. Cima Systems provides interactive automated marketing and customer service solutions to the automotive market. Contact: Lynette Hoeft, cnetgo@aol.com 925-931-0929 x226 www.Cimasystems.net Jennifer Deitsch for NeoSpeech public relations 408.226.7023 deitsch@sbcglobal.net Cima Systems CEO Gary Nixon, lmarino@cimasystems.net (925) 931 – 0929 Brian Keegan, Director of Service and Parts at San Leandro Honda
Nortel Networks Helps Lloyds TSB Reach Customer Service Milestone; Speech-Enabled Self-Service Telephone System Handles 70 Millionth Call: Lloyds TSB (London, UK) has received its 70 millionth automated call - representing more than 84 million financial transactions - through a speech-enabled customer self-service telephone system based on an interactive voice response (IVR) solution from Nortel Networks (NYSE:NT)(TSX:NT). The system is based on Nortel Networks VPS/is (Voice Processing Series/Information Server) IVR platforms at Lloyds TSB locations throughout the UK and uses Nuance ASR. It permits customers to carry out financial transactions at a time suitable to them by simply speaking their instructions. The instructions are converted into commands that are executed on the bank's mainframe computers. Responses are provided to customers in natural speech. Despite initial concerns about skepticism of speech-enabled solutions, customer feedback has been consistent with research undertaken by Lloyds TSB which indicates that such concerns are unwarranted. The results indicate that customers readily adopt such services if they are quick, simple and reliable. The IVR solution has evolved throughout Lloyds TSB's relationship with Nortel Networks to address changing customer needs. Lloyds TSB has added features and functionality to its system without costly equipment replacements, underlining the benefits of Nortel Networks focus on protecting and maximizing initial investment. www.nortelnetworks.com Contacts: Nortel Networks, Giorgia Casnedi, +44 1628 43 3117 casnedi@nortelnetworks.com Emile Abu-Shakra, +44 20 7356 1878 emile.abu-shakra@lloydstsb.co.uk
Rhetorical TTS at Sparda Bank: The application, part of an all inclusive package to eliminate touch tone self-service calls, uses Rhetorical's German rVoice to provide customers with details of accounts, the ability to pay bills and an ATM location service. The installation is the latest collaboration for Rhetorical and SemanticEdge. The system handles over 50,000 customer service calls a month and has dramatically reduced the amount of time Sparda's 140,000 customers spend on the phone. The system allows customers to instantly carry out basic banking functions without endless menus, hold music, button pushing or waiting in queues. The service went live in August and uses Nuance speech recognition software to listen to the user's inquiry before responding through the rVoice interface. When a customer wants to make a payment, the system will recognize the name of the recipient and the purpose of the payment. When a customer asks about the cash machine nearest to his current location, or he wants to let the bank know of a change of address, the system will recognise all place names and street names. In total 50 different services have been automated. Despite the complexity of such an operation the installation went very smoothly with minimal disruption to either the business or the customers. www.rhetorical.com www.semanticedge.com or call +49 30 345077 0. Sparda-Bank Hamburg, now in its 100th year, is the largest cooperative bank in Northern Germany. It has over 145,000 customers and a balance sheet total of nearly 2 billion Euro. The focus of the retail bank has always been on private customers, and its excellent service has been rewarded with many prizes over the years. The no-charges-bank has 16 branches, two of which opened in 2003, and continues to grow. Sparda Bank Hamburg is headquartered in Germany. www.spare-cent.de ++49 40 380 15-171. Juergen Mehring, responsible for this project at Sparda-Bank SemanticEdge, +49 30 345077 0, +44 131 525 6800 Marc Moen, Marc@rhetoricalsystems.com
ScanSoft Speech Solution Efficiently Handles More than Eight Million Calls and Generates New Revenues for Dollar Rent A Car: ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT), recognized Dollar Rent A Car with a Milestone Achievement Award for reaching a critical customer service milestone with their speech solution. Since its implementation, Dollar has successfully served eight million customers through its automated customer service personalities "SARA" (Speech Activated Reservations Agent) and "DEE" (derived from DTAG "Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group"). ScanSoft's Milestone Achievement Award is designed to recognize companies who have achieved significant financial returns from ScanSoft speech recognition deployments. Winners are required to have fully deployed systems for at least 12 months and documented financial targets and results. Milestone drivers include substantial cost savings as a result of increased automation, improved productivity that results in new revenues, or substantial customer satisfaction gains. ScanSoft presented the Milestone Achievement Award to Dollar Rent A Car at Conversations 2003, ScanSoft's annual speech conference. As with most businesses that need to serve customers promptly and efficiently, Dollar Rent A Car's customer contact centers are under continuous demand to improve customer service, reduce lost calls and ultimately increase sales and decrease transaction costs. SARA is focused on reconfirming and canceling reservations while her counterpart DEE obtains, retrieves and communicates booking information. Dollar Rent A Car's top-line goal in introducing both SARA and DEE was to reduce customer call time from 150 seconds to 125 seconds. In May 2003, Dollar achieved this milestone and then proceeded to take full advantage of the timesavings to train their live "agents" to become even more sales oriented. As a result, SARA and DEE have contributed to a 1.4% increase in Dollar's annual conversion rate, providing Dollar with several million dollars in additional revenue. Dollar Rent A Car, a subsidiary of Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Inc., (NYSE: DTG), has over 400 worldwide locations in 26 countries, with a significant presence in Australia, Canada, the Caribbean and Latin America, including more than 250 locations in the United States. www.dollar.com www.ScanSoft.com CONTACT:ScanSoft, Inc. Marie Ruzzo, 617-428-4444 marie.ruzzo@scansoft.com Janet Worley, Staff Vice-President of Customer Sales and Service at Dollar
TeleWest Broadband Chooses Syntellect's
VistaPayment for Credit Card Payments Over the Phone
Telewest Broadband has selected Syntellect's VistaPayment
voice-enabled credit card payment system. The system has
been deployed and went live on October 16, 2003. Telewest
Broadband operates a telecommunications, Internet and cable
television service across many locations in the UK and has
over 1.7 million customers. VistaPayment enables
Telewest Broadband to reduce the cost of credit card
transactions by automating a function that is currently
outsourced and by streamlining the company's collections
strategy. Using speech recognition technology, VistaPayment
also enables Telewest Broadband to deliver a consistent brand
message to its customers through a custom designed Voice User
Interface (VUI). Last year Telewest processed in excess of
1.9 million card payments manually. +44 (0) 1628 897 500,
1.800.788.2800 www.syntellect.com or www.enghouse.com Telewest Communications plc, the broadband
communications and media group, currently passes 4.9 million
homes and provides multi-channel television, telephone and
internet services to 1.72 million UK households, and voice
and data telecommunications services to around 78,800
business customers. Its content division, Flextech, is the
BBC's partner in UKTV. Together they are the largest supplier
of basic channels to the UK pay-TV market with a portfolio
that combines wholly owned and managed channels, including
the eleven joint venture channels with the BBC. Contact: Diana
M Fergusan, Syntellect, 1.800.788.9733, dferguson@syntellect.com Katrien Henecz +44 (0)1628 897456 khenecz@syntellect.com Sean Risebrow, Telewest Broadband's head of billing
strategy and development.
Tellme at AT&T Wireless: Personalization can enhance the customer experience as well. No. 3 U.S. carrier AT&T Wireless (AWE) uses speech-recognition software from privately held Tellme Networks (Mountain View, Calif.), that identifies the caller's number, then dips into the carrier's database to check whether the person is an existing subscriber. The software then tries to speed up the inquiry by guessing why the customer is calling and offering help: For instance, after first signing up for the service, many people call for help with setting up their mailbox. Tellme's software also includes an address-book feature that lets customers issue voice commands, such as "call mom at home." And by dialing *121, they can get stock quotes and news bites via voice, buy movie tickets, or get driving directions. www.tellme.com Contact: Marci Gottlieb 650-930-9060 marci@tellme.com Megan Dyer 650-930-9247 megan@tellme.com
Tellme’s Voice Application Network Servicing 1-800-FLY-SONG: Tellme Networks Inc. (Mountain View, CA) and Song (Atlanta, GA), an airline operated by Delta Air Lines, announced 1-800-FLY-SONG will provide callers with a way to find flights and book tickets, all using their voice. 1-800-FLY-SONG delivers the information a caller requests and matches them with the lowest fares. Delta is providing a customer service number, 1-800-FLY-SONG, using speech recognition and an Internet application to provide information to callers, giving them the most current flight and fare information available. It is a single point of contact for everything customers need from Song, including flight status, fares and schedules, reservations, travel information, Web support and baggage assistance. The technology behind 1-800-FLY-SONG is voice recognition and the VoiceXML Internet-telecom standard running on Tellme’s Voice Application Network. The service was created by Tellme. "1-800-FLY-SONG is answering calls now. www.tellme.com Contact: Marci Gottlieb 650-930-9060 marci@tellme.com Megan Dyer 650-930-9247 megan@tellme.com Joanne D. Smith, vice president of marketing and customers for Song
Brisbane's Black & White Cabs to Adopt Text-to-Speech in IVR Upgrade: Less than three years after introducing a VisibleVoice Interactive Voice Response system (IVR) to automate its taxi bookings, Black & White Cabs of Brisbane is expanding its booking system to provide customers with a more efficient service. This will be done through the use of a VisibleVoice Text-to-Speech (TTS) system that will achieve additional functionality producing significant cost savings for the company. TTS is able to increase the performance of the IVR by confirming a customer's pick-up address (by saying the address), and automatically providing booking numbers for bookings made via Black & White courtesy phones. VisibleVoice, a division of Melbourne-based communications technology company Stratum Communications Ltd., is a Scansoft partner and has adopted the Speechify TTS system for the Black & White Cabs application which is expected to be live in the near future. Black & White Cabs, one of Australia's largest taxi operators, already relies on its existing IVR system to automatically handle more than one million phone bookings a year - or around 25 per cent of its total phone bookings. Significant savings have resulted for Black & White and its customers have benefited from the improved service levels. The Black & White Cabs TTS system will be used to read to the caller an address saved in a database against their phone number, therefore allowing the caller to confirm that the address was correct rather than simply being told "we already know your address". In addition to helping to maintain accuracy of the address details (and hence avoid taxis being sent to the wrong address), TTS provides mobile phone callers with the ability of confirming or correcting pick-up address details, and thus opens the automated booking system to mobile calls. Black & White Cabs is also installing a second VisibleVoice IVR to handle additional calls at peak periods and to act as a back-up to the original system in the event of any unexpected failure. www.visiblevoice.com Visible Voice’s General Manager, Gary Moreland, garym@visiblevoice.com Joe Cilmi – Executive Manager - Sales & Marketing joec@visiblevoice.com Andrew Weiss (03) 9695 1920 Black & White Cabs' Information Technology Manager, Michael Cowley
Premier Cabs Deploys Visible Voice: One of Australia’s largest taxi companies, Sydney’s Premier Cabs, has installed a new speech based automatic telephone taxi booking system developed by VisibleVoice. The VisibleVoice system is based on the company's interactive telephony platform called VeloCT, using speech recognition technology from ScanSoft and integrates with the Raywood taxi despatch system to offer callers wanting a taxi a self-service booking facility with no waiting. The VisibleVoice solution uses speech recognition for key elements in the booking order thereby improving overall user friendliness. The VisibleVoice solution was installed on-site in two days and was successfully processing customer bookings on the third day. The solution quickly met initial transaction success rate targets with the success rate improving following a tuning update based on the first 4 weeks of collected data. The VisibleVoice system is now the predominant system of its type in use within the Australian taxi industry. Systems have already been supplied in cooperation with Raywood Communications to Black and White Cabs and Yellow Cabs in Brisbane, and Yellow Cabs in Adelaide. A VisibleVoice auto-booking system was also installed with the Dubai Transport Corporation in 2001 providing multilingual telephone and Internet taxi booking services. www.premiercabs.com.au www.scansoft.com www.visiblevoice.com Visible Voice’s General Manager, Gary Moreland, garym@visiblevoice.com Joe Cilmi – Executive Manager - Sales & Marketing joec@visiblevoice.com Andrew Weiss (03) 9695 1920 , Peter Hyer, Managing Director, Premier Cabs
3PV – Third Party Verification,
Inc. Adds Mandarin Language Support to Its Martina Speech
Enabled Verification Platform: 3PV – Third Party
Verification, Inc.(Altamonte Springs, Florida) announced
the availability of Mandarin language capabilities for its
flagship Martina speech enabled verification platform
at the ASCENT 2003 Fall Conference. All contact centers
interfacing with 3PV’s Martina Third Party
Verification (TPV) or Martina FastTrak TPV
solutions are now natively trilingual, able to handle
verifications in English, Spanish or Mandarin.
Leading the industry with average completion rates over 90%, Martina
TPV and Martina FastTrak TPV are the only
verification solutions that meet the requirements of the FCC,
FTC and all 50 states. Martina TPV services include,
at no additional charge, live agent reviews, billing only for
completed transactions, intuitive scripting, real-time
reporting, archiving and on-demand access for two years or
more. Martina is available in two versions: Martina
TPV solution, which can be tailored specifically to meet
more complex requirements; and Martina FastTrak TPV, a
rapid deployment solution for companies that do not require
custom scripting. Founded in 1999, 3PV provides innovative
third party verification (TPV) solutions using natural
language speech recognition verification. 3PV blends advanced
automated services with traditional live agent functions,
resulting in completion rates that average over 90%. All 3PV
verification solutions meet or exceed FCC, FTC and state
requirements for carrier, utility and commercial services.
Technology partners include Nuance, Intel / Dialogic, and
Dell. www.3PV.com Contact: David Goldstone, 3PV - THIRD PARTY
VERIFICATION, 407-865-9966, David Brinkman, 3PV’s Chief
Operating Officer
Apropos Technology Announces Embedded Universal Queuing and Speech-Enabled Self Service for PeopleSoft CRM 8.8:Apropos Technology (NASDAQ: APRS)( Oakbrook Terrace, IL) announced a seamless integration of the Company’s v6.0 Enterprise Edition with PeopleSoft CRM v8.8. The product showcases the Apropos’ patented "Universal Queue" technology -- where real time customer interactions, such as voice, voice mail, email, and web chats, can be visually displayed and prioritized -- embedded entirely within the PeopleSoft CRM application. The integration enables a single application to intelligently queue both real time interactions and business workflow tasks, providing a unified application environment for managing customer-related interactions and service level commitments. Apropos has demonstrated several of the advanced features of Apropos v6.0 within the PeopleSoft CRM application, including advanced speech recognition to open support tickets, "text-to-speech" technologies for customer self-service, and the provision of voice, web and email interaction histories to users to help troubleshoot issues and improve customer support. With the integration of Apropos v6.0, PeopleSoft can provide significant productivity gains to its customers through speech-enabled self service, improved skills and rules administration, managed service levels for both business workflow and communication tasks, and enhanced reporting on contact center activity and business trends. The Apropos – PeopleSoft integration provides a "best in class" web application environment that will enhance user productivity while greatly reducing IT administration and support costs. www.peoplesoft.com. Apropos Technology at 877-APROPOS (877-277-6767) www.apropos.com. Contact: Frank Leonard, Apropos Technology, (630) 472-9600 ext. 7724, frank.leonard@apropos.com
Maxxar Corporation Enhances IPXpress with New Offerings from Shoreline; Softphone, 'Find-Me' Call Handling Enables Real-Time Response: Maxxar Corporation announced new capabilities that help mobilize organizations and keep human as well as information resources in play - any time, anywhere. The offering integrates new softphone and "find-me" features into Maxxar's IPXpress using the system's unique Personal Call Manager interface to deliver a complete mobility solution that is easy to deploy, manage and use. It is complemented by new modular Voice Switch product configurations and enhanced administrative assistant solutions. IPXpress is a user-oriented voice system that associates phone numbers with people, not offices. Calls are routed to the appropriate customer representative, whether that's to a desk, in a branch office or using Maxxar's new softphone over a remote VPN connection. Customer representatives provide a single contact number and have a single voicemail box, eliminating redundant calls and duplicate messages. When customer representatives are not present on the network, callers can ask IPXpress to track them down. Individual financial institutions control how and when this option is offered, and IPXpress can even check MS Outlook calendars to determine what to do with the call based on individual activities. Personal information is now being combined with presence and used to manage call flow intelligently. IPXpress' new softphone feature raises the mobility bar by encapsulating a full-featured phone in a notebook computer that customer representatives can connect over a broadband network. When a customer representative logs into the enterprise VPN, calls are automatically routed to that individual. A consistent voice environment customized by a personal telephony profile is readily available. IPXpress has new tools that allow administrative assistants to support people across physical boundaries: -- Delegation of call control: Users can delegate control over call-handling options to assistants at their own discretion, without any help from the system administrator. -- Multiple-line support: Administrative assistants can now monitor and manage up to four additional lines, and pick up important calls with a single touch. Monitored lines can be next door or across the country. -- Cross-site intercom: An integrated intercom feature on IPXpress' new softphone works across sites, enabling receptionists and assistants to call people across the continent, as if they were in the next office. IPXpress utilizes the Shoreline4.3 from Shoreline Communications, Inc. as its system platform. Shoreline is a specialist in IP Telephony enterprise software and hardware products, Shoreline4.3 is the latest version of Shoreline's multi-site IP PBX. Maxxar has installed more than 2,000 computer telephony and electronic commerce systems worldwide. www.maxzar.com Contact Max Bishop, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development max.bishop@maxxar.com, (248) 675-1040, ext. 125.
NetByTel Integrates UPS OnLine Tools
into its Suite of Voice Self-Service Applications: As the
holidays approach and gift-givers begin to nervously wonder
whether packages will get to their recipients on time, NetByTel
(Boca Raton, FL) has completed integration of UPS
OnLine Tools into its suite of voice self-service
applications. Walmart.com and Computers4Sure are among the
first of NetByTel's retail clients to integrate the solution
and offer their callers enhanced customer service and peace
of mind that their holiday shipments are on schedule. The
integration also allows call centers to better handle the
huge increase in calls during the holiday season, as
NetByTel's solution can handle the repetitive shipment status
calls without tying up a live agent's time. In addition to
shipment status, NetByTel's award-winning voice self-service
applications include lead capture, name and address change,
literature request, location finder, and many more. As a
hosted solution, NetByTel eliminates the lengthy
implementation process and the extensive investment required
by traditional speech development projects so that
enterprises can quickly begin using and benefiting from the
solutions. Given the rapid advances in speech and telephony
technology, and an industry average investment of more than
half a million dollars in capital equipment and development
for speech projects, NetByTel's solutions offer customers a
high value / low risk entry to voice self-service solutions
for their business. www.netbytel.com Contact:
Bridgette King, NetByTel Public Relations Tel: 561-981-1980 bking@netbytel.com
Prosodie Launches Vocal Editor: Prosodie is launching "Vocal Editor" for voice applications. Thanks to a safe web interface, which can be completely modified in real time, these applications give companies a bigger autonomy of action, a source of productivity. This service can modify in real time all the voice applications. From a safe web interface, companies can intervene on their interactive voice server in only few minutes: * loading/unloading rubrics or voice messages on their voice menu, * changing the order of rubrics and digital codes associated, * creating new messages with synthetic voices. Thanks to "Vocal Editor", companies have more dynamic voice applications and can be more reactive according to their business. The stand-alone administrator can adapt the tool without previous technical knowledge. This solution, which is developed in ASP and hosted in Prosodie, is based on its safe infrastructure, its technologies and its well-known expertise. Two Prosodie clients have already adopted this solution: RTLNet, to change the parameters of its interactive games and Eurospot (Swisscom Group), to modify the messages of its WIFI hotline voice server. www.prosodie.com Contact: Francine GAILLARD – Communication – +33 1 4684 1176 fgaillard@prosodie.com
VoiceLog Offers Third Party Verification for Wireline-Wireless Number Portability: Now that the FCC has decided that number portability extends to transferring numbers from wireline to wireless providers (and back), wireless carriers will now be forced to consider compliance with the FCC's anti-slamming rules. Under those rules, "No telecommunications carrier shall submit or execute a change on the behalf of a subscriber in the subscriber's selection of a provider of telecommunications service ... " except in compliance with the FCC rules, which provide for either a signed letter of authorization, electronic verification or third party verification (see FCC rules: CFR 47 subpart K section 64.1100). Carriers who want to sell wireless services in a telemarketing environment will want to consider third party verification -- the only proven verification method that works in telemarketing. VoiceLog (Gaithersburg, MD) offers a process that not only complies with FCC rules, but also provides a binding contract under the Federal E-Sign Act, allowing cellular carriers to execute service agreements with customers over the telephone. VoiceLog third party verification is in use by more than half of all telecommunications carriers that use third party verification. VoiceLog TPV provides savings of up to 75%, 24x7 instant access, 99.999% reliability, 100% digital recording, telephone or Web-based recording retrieval, speech recognition, touch tone or live operator service, Any Language on Earth language support and a host of other benefits. VoiceLog TPV allows wireless carriers a tool to document customer requests to change wireless carriers while porting telephone numbers to another carrier. With VoiceLog TPV, wireless carriers can easily defend themselves against complaints by competitors, customers, or state or federal consumer protection agencies that numbers were ported to a new service provider without customer agreement. In addition to its verification services, VoiceLog now offers Call Center Recording Services, allowing call centers to have full-time recording and monitoring capabilities on a "pay as you go" basis. VoiceLog Call Center Recording services include full-time and on-demand recording, quality monitoring and record scoring, transcription, and recording storage and archival. VoiceLog third party verification services include speech recognition and touch-tone driven automated verification, web and email-based verification callback services and live agent verification. www.voicelog.com or www.virtuallogger.com. Contact Larry Leikin at 301-230-2129 lleikin@voicelog.com
Telephone - IVR Partnerships/Financials
Atos Origin teams with Kirusa for delivery of multimodal solutions in Western Europe: Atos Origin and Kirusa, are partnering to develop the European market for multimodal applications. The two groups will join their marketing efforts and demonstrate their multimodality solutions. Multimodal applications allow wireless phone and PDA users to have simpler access to information and services by speaking a command or using visual inputs such as typing or tapping with a stylus. The results are then delivered visually on the wireless device screen, by voice, or through innovative combinations of both voice and visual modes. The input and output methods are controlled by the individual user. A sample multimodal service might allow a user to speak the names of cities when requesting the schedule for trains between two cities. The times and routing for the trains are then automatically delivered and displayed on the screen of the mobile handset, therefore eliminating the need for the user to remember or write them down. Atos Origin and Kirusa will jointly market and sell multimodal solutions in several European countries. The Kirusa solution was deployed at Atos Origin offices in France, and sample applications were built by Atos Origin. The agreement allows Atos Origin to build, market and sell multimodal applications, based on Kirusa’s multimodal technologies. www.atosorigin.com Contact : Emilie Moreau - +33 (0)1 49 00 91 87 - emilie.moreau@atosorigin.com www.kirusa.com Press Contact : Inderpal Singh Mumick- +1 732 623-2118 - mumick@kirusa.com Michel-Ange Camhi, R&D Manager in charge of new voice technologies at Atos Origin
Rhetorical and BBN Technologies Sign Speech Technology Licensing Agreement: BBN Technologies (Cambridge, MA), a Verizon company, and Rhetorical have signed a licensing agreement involving the sale of speech-recognition and language-processing technologies. The agreement gives BBN Technologies rights to integrate current and future versions of Rhetorical's text-to-speech technology in BBN's speech-recognition system (HARK). New words and names can be added dynamically to both the speech-to-text and text-to-speech components, synchronizing their knowledge for a better user experience. Verizon, BBN's parent company, was the first to test the new speech-recognition product in some of Verizon's call centers. In addition to technology licensing, the agreement provides a framework for long-term cooperation in marketing. BBN Technologies, a Verizon Communications company, was established as Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. in 1948. From its roots as an acoustical design consulting firm, to the implementation and operation of the ARPANET-the forerunner of today's Internet-to the development of the first network email, which established the @ sign as an icon for the digital age, BBN Technologies provides the same technical expertise and innovation to both government and commercial customers today. These areas of expertise include: system integration; distributed, collaborative applications; speech recognition; language understanding; wireless and satellite networking; network architecture and management; information security; structural acoustics; sensor signal processing; and real-time, multi-processor systems. With more than 750 employees in 15 offices across the US, BBN Technologies had revenues in 2000 of approximately $118 million. www.bbn.com www.verizon.com www.rhetorical.com Contact: Mark Marchand, 518-396-1080 mark.a.marchand@verizon.com +44 131 525 6800 info@rhetorical.com Marc Moen, Marc@rhetoricalsystems.com
Computer Talk Technology Selects NMS Communications to Enhance Customer Service Offering and Enable Seamless IP Migration: Computer Talk Technology (CTT) announced that the latest version of its flagship all-in-one solution, iceCube, will be based on hardware from NMS Communications (Nasdaq:NMSS). NMS' feature-rich offerings are based on open standards and engineered to provide a seamless path for migration to IP networking. As the industry begins the move to IP networking, CTT and NMS offer companies a way to seamlessly make the transition. NMS future-proofs investments by supporting both switched and packet networks on the same hardware platform. NMS technology integrates with any legacy environment and utilizes a common development platform across hardware, operating system, and network. CTT's iceCube is a flexible, scalable contact solution that manages multi-channel communication, allowing contact centers to focus on customer care. NMS' scalable and flexible platform provides CTT with the ability to support 400 agents. iceCube provides complete speech self-service through Voice I/O (speech recognition, digitized prompts, and text-to-speech) - all in a single-box solution. The NMS and iceCube systems work in tandem to provide the ultimate communications experience. iceCube's point-and-click workflow tools let users design and implement workflows and scripts quickly and easily, without the additional costs or delays of vendor intervention. CTT's customers include Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Barclays Bank, TD Waterhouse, Staples, Pfizer, Citibank, Via Rail, Staples/Business Depot, CustomerWorks, An Accenture Company, Pfizer Inc, and Grocery Gateway. www.computer-talk.com. www.nmscommunications.com Contact: Pam Kukla, 508-271-1611Pam_Kukla@nmss.com Greg Blackett, Director of Marketing, Computer Talk Technology, Inc., Tel: 905-882-5000, Ext. 128, Toll-free: 1-800-410-1051, gblackett@icescape.com
Contact Solutions Selects Intervoice To Help Deliver Faster, More Flexible Automated Contact Management Solutions: Contact Solutions, Inc. announced their selection of Intervoice, Inc. as a key component in the Company's unique delivery strategy to provide faster, more flexible automated contact management solutions to the Fortune 500 marketplace. Intervoice is one of the industry's most widely recognized platform architecture providers, delivering enterprise and carrier-class speech and IVR solutions. Contact Solutions' suite of customized offerings helps enterprises keep in touch with their customers, prospects and business partners better, faster and with greater user satisfaction than ever before. Contact Solutions' complete hosting of a client's automated contact strategy is highly cost-effective and delivers the maximum advantages of contact automation, combining a superior customer experience with complex integration. The Contact Solutions strategy of selecting the best providers and developers and using broadly recognized technology allows their clients rapid time-to-market for their automated contact solutions, and maximum flexibility by avoiding proprietary technology. This approach gives clients the option to seamlessly switch providers or move these services in-house - a rare and highly flexible model in this space. This unique, open business model allows customers to choose Contact Solutions with confidence, knowing they will not be stuck in a proprietary environment. www.intervoice.com www.contactsolutions.com Contact: Stephanie Leonard, 972-454-8231, stephanie.leonard@intervoice.com Heathere Evans-Keenan, 703-875-8969 heathere@keenanpr.com Paul Logan, president and CEO of Contact Solutions
Converge Online deploys the SoPHONE VoiceXML platform with Elan Sayso: Converge Online, a software publisher specialised in VoiceXML platforms, has chosen Elan Sayso for the SoPHONE VoiceXML platform, designed to allow companies develop interactive telephone services to generate new revenue, reduce the cost of their call centers and encourage client fidelity. The SoPHONE platform comes complete with Elan Sayso technology, and allows developers to first test the ergonomy of a service before recording the static menus, and then use the TTS to read dynamic information with an extremely natural voice. Using Elan Sayso, it is fast and easy to design, test and develop a new interactive service. One of the deployments of VoiceXML 2.0 SoPHONE platform from Converge Online was for Filmbox, a company specialised in automated video and DVD rental machines. To enrich their offer, Filmbox has launched a reservation service via phone or internet, so their customers can check if their chosen film is available, and reserve it at their local machine. Elan's TTS allowed Filmbox to develop and test the user-friendliness of their service before recording the menu prompts with their speaker. Elan Sayso is also used to ensure that the dynamic information is always up-to-date. Founded in 2000, Converge Online, awarded the title of innovating company by the ANVAR, has clients such as Media Plazza, French yellow pages (Pages Jaunes), Orange or Audition, and France Telecom is one of its main shareholders. www.convergeonline.com www.elanspeech.com/demos/sayso.htm Contact: Caroline Houel, Elan Speech +33 (0)5 62 24 71 22 chouel@elanspeech.com Baudouin Corman, Business Development Manager at Converge Online, +33 1 55 26 42 40 info@convergeonline.com
Edify and Datria join forces to Provide
Packaged Voice-enabled Field Services Software Applications:
Edify Corporation, an S1 (Santa Clara, CA) and Datria
(Englewood, CO) have entered into a new marketing agreement
that will extend and enhance their current offerings in the
speech-enabled field service marketplace. The agreement
enables organizations around the globe to combine Edify's
open-standards platform with Datria's proven field service
applications in a robust, integrated solution. The
combination of Edify's technology and Datria's applications
means customers can improve field service productivity while
reducing operating costs and maintaining the flexibility of
an open-system solution. Datria Systems, Inc., designs,
sells, and services voice-enabled, packaged software
applications focused on improving the productivity of mobile
workforces while reducing the cost to support them. Datria's
products enable customers to exchange real-time information
between a central office and field representatives, using
only human voices and a simple phone connection. Datria's
first packaged product, Ticket Management 2.0,
delivers improved productivity and reduced operating costs
for field service operations. www.datria.com More than 2,000 organizations worldwide utilize
Edify's standards-based platform to manage complex data to
deliver a consistent and satisfying customer experience
across all channels while providing a high return on
investment. 408-982-2000 (USA), +81 3 5532 7227 (Japan), +852
2806 5700 (Hong Kong), or +44 162 885 0222 (Europe, Middle
East, Africa) www.edify.com www.s1.com Cara Sloman, Nadel Phelan, Inc. Direct:
831.440.2411, Main: 831.439.5570 cara@nadelphelan.com
Elix and Nü Echo partnership begins to bear fruit: Elix (Montréal, Québec,) announced that its partnership with Nü Echo is sailing from success to success. This successful partnership expresses itself in complementary expertise and an efficient work team on projects such as the City of Montreal and Desjardins. Convinced of the success of this alliance, the two businesses are now offering a complete range of courses on speech technology, from introduction to speech technologies to the design of voice user interfaces (VUIs), and VoiceXML programming. These courses are given by a team of high-caliber trainers, whose expertise is based on years of experience in the design of technologies, platforms, and speech recognition applications. Elix, specialist in contact center solutions, offers a complete range of products and services for the development and optimization of contact centers. Elix’s expertise is used by large high-profile companies such as VISA, Duke Power, ABN-AMRO, IKEA, and Air Canada. From traditional contact center solutions to more advanced solutions that use technologies such as computer telephony convergence (CTI), interactive voice response, speech recognition, VoiceXML, fax, and Web integration, Elix takes advantage of its expertise in the evaluation, design, implementation, and training of organizations in the management and integration of efficient solutions that serve their most important assets, their customers. Elix’s mission is supported by Intel Fonds de Communications, Fondaction (CSN), GTI Capital, and Bell Mobilité Investissements. www.elixonline.com Nü Echo provides consulting services and solutions that enable organizations to quickly deploy speech applications. It offers a range of professional services in the domains of speech recognition and the design of dialogues from strategic or technical advice to turn-key projects. It also offers solutions that can be tailored to specific customer needs. Among its strengths are Nü Echo’s independence from technology and platform vendors, its extensive experience in speech recognitions, and more than 10 years of experience in the development and deployment of speech applications and technologies, and the tools used to develop them. Contact: Elix, Rita Azrak, Director, Marketing et Communications rita.azrak@elixonline.com + 1.514.768.1000, ext. 2323 Verrecchia Group Communications Inc. Marlene Kovac marlene@vergroup.com + 1.514.935.0166, ext 148 Nü Echo, Pascal Deschênes, pascal.deschenes@nuecho.com Tel.: + 1.514.861.3246, poste 226
Kirusa teams with HP to Deliver Multimodal Solutions for Wireless Service Providers: Kirusa and HP are partnering to deliver multimodal solutions on the HP OpenCall Media Platform (OCMP) and HP carrier-grade servers. Multimodal solutions allow wireless phone and PDA users to have simpler access to information and services by speaking a command or using visual inputs such as typing or tapping with a stylus. The results are then delivered visually on the wireless device screen, by voice, or through innovative combinations of both voice and visual modes. The input and output methods are controlled by the individual user. Compared to single-mode services, multimodal services are more intuitive and easier to use, boosting subscriber satisfaction and service usage, while driving service provider revenue and improving subscriber retention. Kirusa and HP demonstrated multimodal solutions at the HP booth at SpeechTEK in New York. From October 12 to October 18, a jointly-developed multimodal railway journey application was be demonstrated by HP at the ITU Telecom World in Geneva. www.hp.com/hpinfo/telecomworld Kirusa develops multimodal solutions based on its patent pending technology, using standards such as X+V and SALT. Kirusa's customers include the world’s leading telecom carriers, such as France Telecom, Bouygues Telecom, and Mobilkom Austria. OCMP is a scalable, carrier-grade voice service platform that enables the rapid development of new generation messaging, portals and enhanced voice-enabled interactive services. It provides the highest density voice access, voice-processing and critical call control functions and utilizes the world-leading HP SS7 signaling technology built into industry standard servers. HP has already deployed over 350,000 voice ports and more than 2200 systems in 45 countries. www.kirusa.com www.hp.com Contact: Marco Limena, vice president and general manager, Worldwide Solutions, HP Network & Service Provider Business Unit
Loquendo and Phonologies sign OEM Agreement Loquendo ASR and Loquendo Speaker Verification Integrated within the Phonologies Platform Solution Phonologies and Loquendo announced an OEM alliance to deliver Phonologies flexible solution powered by Loquendo to the banking and financial, and military and government sector in India. Phonologies offers solutions that are characterised by a flexible design and open architecture that make integration easy and open up new avenues for existing networks and infrastructure. Phonologies has chosen to integrate Loquendo ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) technology and Loquendo Speaker Verification technology. Loquendo's speaker-independent recognition engine currently ships in 12 languages from around the world. Loquendo Speaker Verification technology uses the voiceprint as a biometric to ascertain an individual's identity and enables self-service customers to benefit from a secure, reliable alternative to traditional password identification for an even friendlier remote user experience. Phonologies is initially targeting its Loquendo powered Voice Platform towards the banking and financial sector in India, bringing existing web based services to the phone. On the other hand, Phonologies Secure Unified Communications Platform has been indigenously designed to serve in Military and Government environments and networks to enhance security and efficiency of communication. Phonologies' Voice Platform, bundled with Loquendo's Speech Recognition and Speaker Verification Engine, enable banks and financial institutions in India to offer Secure, 24*7, "phone banking" services to their customers in a flexible and personalized manner. Phonologies Platforms have been designed for rapid integration into contact center and "other" generic communications' networks, allowing for easy deployment of off-the-shelf services. The first voice portal application for the Banking sector is currently being deployed as a pilot project with one of Asia's largest banks. Phonologies was founded in July 2001 and develops and markets customized Voice Platforms based on VoiceXML and SIP, and, customized voice application solutions for Contact Centers, Military and Government Agencies, Telcos and ISPs and SME's, to provide enhanced 24/7 self-service applications. Phonologies' flagship product InterpreXer 3.0, is a 100% VoiceXML 2.0 Voice Browser with support for distributed Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech and IP based communication components. Phonologies is an active member of the Marketing Committee, VoiceXML Forum, and also has a strategic alliance with the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai to carry out research and development. www.phonologies.com www.loquendo.com Prashant Lamba Director - Business Development Prashant@Phonologies.COM www.phonologies.com Phonologies (India) Private Limited G-46 Dhanraj Mahal, Chh Shivaji Marg, Mumbai 39. INDIA. Ph:+91-22-22029732 mail@phonologies.com Loquendo, Gaea Vilage, Loquendo - Vocal Technology and Services Tel +39 011.757.6153 gaea.vilage@loquendo.com
Summit Information Systems to Resell Maxxar's TNT Solution; Maxxar Corporation, a has enhanced its strategic alliance with Fiserv, Inc. Summit Information Systems, the first Fiserv business unit to take advantage of the expanded relationship, will offer its credit union clients advanced speech recognition, interactive voice response (IVR) and several related technologies on its Spectrum core processing system. The agreement includes the integration of Maxxar's Total Natural Transaction system (TNT) with the Summit Spectrum system. It is anticipated that TNT will provide both Natural Language Speech Recognition and Touch Tone IVR based financial transaction capabilities to members of Summit's client credit unions. Additionally, client credit unions will be able to provide a number of state of the art speech-enabled applications utilizing Natural Language Speech Recognition, Name and Address Recognition and Text to Speech technologies. Optional Speaker Verification will also be available with the system to enhance security. Fiserv, Inc. (Nasdaq: FISV) provides industry leading information management systems and services to the financial industry, including transaction processing, outsourcing, business process outsourcing and software and systems solutions. The company serves more than 14,000 clients worldwide, including banks, broker-dealers, credit unions, financial planners/investment advisers, insurance companies and agents, self-insured employers, lenders and savings institutions. Headquartered in Brookfield, Wis., Fiserv reported $2.3 billion in processing and services revenues for 2002 www.fiserv.com. Summit Information Systems, a unit of Fiserv, Inc., provides both in-house and hosted, advanced technology solutions to more than 300 North American credit unions. For more than 20 years, Summit has focused on the long-term success of its clients by developing and supporting IT solutions, applications, and network solutions. Summit provides product suites scaled to the needs of credit unions in addition to producing development tools for third-party application integration. The Summit Spectrum system, the core of Summit's offerings, is a state-of-the art transaction processing system providing seamless front and back-office functionality. www.summitsite.com. Maxxar solutions are currently being utilized in the financial industry to enhance productivity, strengthen customer services and reduce overall operational costs. Maxxar has installed more than 2,000 computer telephony and electronic commerce systems worldwide. www.maxxar.com Contact Max Bishop, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development max.bishop@maxxar.com, (248) 675-1040, ext. 125. Summit Information Systems Dave Pumper, 800-937-7500, ext. 6235 dave.pumper@summit.fiserv.com Kevin Sparks, president of Summit Information Systems
TuVox Closes $6 Million Financing Led By Foundation Capital: TuVox (Los Altos, CA) announced that the company has closed a $6 million equity financing led by new investor Foundation Capital with participation by existing TuVox investors, Granite Ventures and Adobe Ventures. Paul Holland will join the TuVox board. The funding will enable TuVox to expand operations in engineering, sales and marketing and follows several significant customer wins, new partnerships and product releases. TuVox recently announced availability of CVR 3.0, which includes Machine Assisted Dialog Generation (MADGen). The company also announced its partner program, Team TuVox. TuVox’ CVR applications are achieving consistently high levels of user acceptance at customers such as TiVo, Activision, and Definity Health. Mr. Holland brings with him the veteran knowledge of working with and aiding technology start-ups in their earliest stages. His primary focus has been the development and acceleration of enterprise software companies. Prior to becoming a general partner at Foundation Capital, Mr. Holland was senior vice president of worldwide sales at Kana Communications, joining them in 1997 as their 18th team member and increasing their sales over 5000% in just three years while helping to take the company public. Before Kana, Mr. Holland helped grow revenues for another highly successful start-up, Pure Software, bringing them from a market value of $2 million to over $1 billion in his five year tenure there as vice president and general manager. Founded in 1995, Foundation Capital is a venture capital firm committed to supporting entrepreneurs and their companies, targeting innovative opportunities in telecommunications and networking; Internet infrastructure; and enterprise software. Enterprise application software companies funded by Foundation Capital include Commerce One, Interwoven, Onyx Software and Chordiant. In May of 2001, Foundation announced the close of Foundation Capital Fund IV, a $595 million fund. Fund IV participants included new limited partners such as Harvard and Yale, as well as all existing limited partners. www.foundationcapital.com TuVox customers include Activision, Handspring, TiVo and Definity Health. www.tuvox.com Contact: TuVox Inc. John Kirst, Tel: ++1-650-623-0210 x137 press@tuvox.com
Telephone Enterprise Messaging – Application/Products/Partnerships
Alcatel Launches Unified Communication: Alcatel (Paris: CGEP.PA and NYSE: ALA) announced the availability of Alcatel OmniTouch Unified Communication, a set of server based software applications designed to optimize business communication. This software solution enables communication tools and applications to work together seamlessly, to improve human interactions and increases productivity by allowing employees to access information and business tools using any device regardless of the location. Alcatel OmniTouch Unified Communication is a unified communication solution implementing the latest Internet technologies (i.e., XML/SOAP, SIP and VXML). The use of these new technologies minimizes capital expenditures by enabling a simplified and cost effective integration of communication functions into web services, providing knowledge workers with a richer, more personalized communication environment with relevant business context. A key business-impacting capability of the Alcatel OmniTouch Unified Communication Software is to provide instant access to the information available in the enterprise and turn this information into knowledge. Alcatel OmniTouch Unified Communication is tightly integrated with the Alcatel OmniPCX Enterprise line of communication servers to deliver new features, improved organizational processes and enhanced business value. The Alcatel OmniTouch Unified Communication suite includes three applications: * My Messaging – A VXML-based unified messaging application handling non real time communications with a single multi-media mailbox (voicemail, email and faxes). Enables remote access to email via phone with Text-to-Speech (TTS) capabilities and the ability to print or broadcast email and faxes by voice command. Also offers message notification filters. * My Phone – An XML/SOAP-based real-time communications management tool that transforms any phone into a business phone when on the move, enabling access to full telephony features (e.g., conference calling, unified directory access, and call log) * My Assistant – A web and VXML-based ‘find-me-follow-me’ call routing and permissions application that defines when, where and by whom to be contacted and diverts non-urgent calls to voice mail. Screens and intelligently routes calls based on caller ID and time of day. As an example, with these three applications employees stuck in traffic can manage their emails and voice mails from their cellular phones by using text to speech and speech recognition. They can also manage their agendas and call customers from their personal address books. www.alcatel.com Contact: caroline.mille@alcatel.com Tel.: +33 1 40761189 Jean-Luc Fourniou, Chief Operating Officer for Alcatel Enterprise Solutions
Esna Technologies Releases an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Scripting Tool for the Telephony OfficeLinX Messaging Platform: Esna Technologies (Toronto, Ontario) announces the launch of IVR software for the Telephony OfficeLinX Messaging platform. IVR applications handle call processing and information delivery needs in order to be more cost and time efficient in our business day. Now, organizations can leverage their voice mail investment in OfficeLinX messaging server by extending the same application to drive their IVR needs, saving management time, resources and reducing hardware costs and requirements. This translates into an enormous ROI on organizations investing in the Telephony OfficeLinX messaging server, while enabling companies to offer enhanced services to their customers at a reduce cost. www.esnatech.com 800-565-3762 or Sales@esna.com. Contact: Esnatech Inc., Davide Petramala, 800-565-3762 davidep@esna.com
Fonix ConnectMe, a Speech-Enabled Auto Attendant, Chosen by Durham Jones & Pinegar: Fonix Corporation (OTC BB: FNIX) has deployed its ConnectMe telephony system in the law offices of Salt Lake City-based Durham Jones & Pinegar. Fonix ConnectMe is a voice-automated telephone operator that professionally routes incoming, outgoing and internal calls. Durham Jones & Pinegar currently uses Fonix ConnectMe to route after-hours calls to attorneys of the firm. Callers speak the name of the attorney they want to reach and are quickly connected to that person's extension. By deploying Fonix ConnectMe, Durham Jones & Pinegar increases attorney efficiency. By going through the ConnectMe system, clients still have after-hours access to their lawyers. Durham Jones & Pinegar is one of Utah's premier law firms focusing on solving client problems in the areas of corporate and business law, real estate, tax, estate planning, intellectual property, litigation, bankruptcy and creditors' rights. www.djplaw.com www.fonix.com Contact: Fonix Corporation, Elizabeth Sweeten, 1-801-553-6600 mediainfo@fonix.com Jeff Jones, attorney and partner of Durham Jones & Pinegar
Fonix To Acquire LecStar Telecom: Fonix Corp. (OTC BB: FNIX), has signed an agreement in principle to acquire all of the capital stock of LTEL Holdings Corp. Privately held LTEL has two wholly owned subsidiaries, LecStar Telecom Inc., an Atlanta-based competitive local exchange carrier, and its sister company, LecStar Datanet Inc., a provider of Internet services to business and residential customers. The stock and debt transaction will involve consideration valued at $33 million. The transaction provides seller financing on terms favorable to Fonix. The acquisition of LecStar is anticipated to significantly accelerate Fonix's growth strategy by providing a recurring revenue stream, a growing customer base and new marketing channels. LecStar's customer base -- which historically has been growing at an annual rate of 60 percent or better - provides a predictable revenue stream and reduces Fonix's cost of capital. LecStar's revenue grew from $4.9 million in 2001 to $9.7 million in 2002 and the company expects to report approximately $16 million in revenue for the year ending Dec. 31, 2003, and expects to be EBITDA positive for the fourth quarter. LecStar's customers also offer a unique direct marketing and distribution channel for Fonix's speech technologies and solutions. This combination will give Fonix immediate access to LecStar's growing customer base, enabling Fonix to bundle its telephony and mobile/wireless speech interface solutions with LecStar's telecommunications services. In addition, LecStar's utility partnerships offer significant opportunities to expand Fonix's marketing channel with system integrators like Meridian, which recently deployed its voice-enabled 511 road traffic information system featuring the Fonix speech solution. In addition to LecStar's stable and growing revenue, Fonix will pursue its position on Microsoft platforms such as Xbox, PocketPC and SmartPhone mobile/wireless devices as well as Symbian devices. Fonix will continue its integrated corporate collaborations with Motorola, Intel, Hitachi, Renesas, Oracle and Seiko Epson. The acquisition will immediately enable Fonix to prudently seek opportunities to acquire other local exchange carriers to further expand the existing customer base, providing Fonix with substantial additional value-added offerings and services to telephone customers. In a cashless transaction, Fonix will acquire 100 percent of the capital stock of LTEL Holdings Corp. from its existing stockholders for total consideration valued at $33 million as follows: -- Holders of LTEL's common stock will receive $3,000,000 of restricted Fonix common stock, which Fonix will register within 120 days after closing. The number of shares of common stock issuable at closing will be equal to $3,000,000 divided by 90 percent of the average closing bid price of Fonix's common stock for the 30 trading days immediately prior to the third trading day preceding the closing. Holders of LTEL's Series A and Series B Preferred Stock will acquire: -- $20,000,000 of Fonix's 5 percent non-convertible, non-voting preferred stock. The dividend on the preferred stock is payable at Fonix's option in cash or registered shares of Fonix common stock; and -- A secured, non-convertible, promissory note in the amount of $10,000,000. The assets of the LecStar subsidiaries of LTEL will secure the note. The note will be amortized over 10 years, accrue interest at 5 percent and will mature six years after closing. LTEL (including its LecStar subsidiaries) will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Fonix and will retain its current management team. Financial statements will be consolidated beginning January 2004. The closing of the acquisition is subject to usual and customary conditions for a transaction of this size and type, including satisfactory completion of due diligence and negotiation and execution of definitive agreements. While there can be no assurance that Fonix will be able to complete this acquisition, Fonix anticipates that it will close the purchase by Dec. 31, 2003. LecStar Telecom Inc. is a rapidly growing Atlanta-based regional provider of integrated communications services to businesses and consumers. LecStar offers a full array of wireline voice, data, long distance and Internet services to business and residential customers throughout BellSouth's Southeastern operating territory. The company is certified by the FCC and nine states -- Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee -- as a competitive local exchange carrier to provide regulated local, long distance and international telecommunications services. www.fonix.com Contact: Fonix Corporation Elizabeth Sweeten, (801) 553-6600 mediainfo@fonix.com Jim Malcom, CFO and Vice President of Finance, LecStar Telecom, Inc. 404-659-9500 jim.malcom@lecstar.com
iVoice Deploying Speech Enabled
Communications System for On Course Information Services
iVoice, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: IVOC) announced that
On Course Information Services is deploying its Speech
Enabled Unified Communications Platform at its
headquarters in Milwaukee, WI. On Course Information Services
is implementing a complete solution that includes iVoice Speech
enabled Auto Attendant, Voice Mail and Unified Messaging
and is able to save thousands of dollars over their
proprietary PBX manufacturers' similar applications. As a
trusted outsourcing partner, On Course uses leading edge
technology to turn oceans of information into manageable
streams that flow smoothly and efficiently. With iVoice Unified
Messaging, your voice, fax, and e-mail messages arrive in
one location, simplifying the management and organization of
vital information. Remote telephone access can play back
voice messages reroute and e-mail messages. The Unified
Messaging system can play back your e-mail messages using
Text-to-Speech technology. Unified Messaging stores
all communications in one universal mailbox that can be
accessed anytime from the telephone or PC. A single mailbox
located on a client/server system makes administration simple
and cost effective. OnCourse Information Services Inc. is a
full-service bureau that provides document-processing
solutions. www.ivoice.com Contact:
iVoice, Inc., Delores Serafin-Sloboda, investors@ivoice.com Jerry Mahoney, CEO, 732-441-7700, jerrym@ivoice.com
WhiteRadio, LTD. and iVoice Offers
Incentive Rebates for Speech Recognition System Purchases
iVoice, Inc. (OTCBB:IVOC) and WhiteRadio, LTD.
announced a $500 to $800 rebate for the purchase of an iVoice
Speech Enabled Auto Attendant Lite system when purchased in
conjunction with a MERLIN MAGIX R2.2, R3.0 or PARTNER ACS (R5
or R6) system from Avaya, for Canadian resellers. An instant
$350 Rebate is also available for US resellers on the iVoice
Speech Enabled Lite system. The Speech Enabled Auto
Attendant provides a Locate feature. By simply saying
"locate", iVoice will transfer the caller to any
desired phone number ensuring a connection is made, and also
includes advanced ANI/DNIS interpretation and control.
Callers can interrupt any pre-recorded message at any time
through the "barge-in" feature. This offer is only
available for a limited time, so Avaya users and dealers are
encouraged to contact WhiteRadio, LTD., for full details on
this offer. The $500.00 to $800 rebate is available to new
WhiteRadio, LTD., clients on the purchase of any 4-port
iVoice Speech Enabled Auto Attendant iVoice LITE (up
to 40 names), version in conjunction with a MERLIN MAGIX
R2.2, R3.0 or PARTNER ACS (R5 or R6) system from Avaya, for
Canadian resellers from November 17, 2003 until January 31,
2004. The instant $350.00 US rebate is available to U.S.
resellers for the iVoice Speech Enabled Lite system
from November 17, 2003 until January 31, 2004 www.WhiteRadio.com www.ivoice.com Contact:
iVoice, Inc., Delores Serafin-Sloboda, investors@ivoice.com Jerry Mahoney, CEO, 732-441-7700, jerrym@ivoice.com
Interlink Network Systems, Inc., Licenses iVoice Speech SDK: iVoice, Inc. (OTCBB:IVOC) announced Interlink Network Systems, Inc.(East Brunswick, New Jersey) has licensed it's Speech SDK ("Software Development Kit"), version 3.0. Interlink Network Systems is currently in the process of integrating iVoice's Speech Recognition into its TxIVR IVR product. The TxIVR product, which can be tailored to most kinds of IVR applications using XML scripting, can now be Voice Activated. IVoice's Speech SDK now provides the capability to continuously analyze incoming speech input, transforming the existing speech model to enable it to handle customized speaker models. The models produced by this capability compensates for speaker accents, telephone line quality, and background noise at the customer site, thereby boosting recognition accuracy. As the model aligns itself to the customer environment, speed of recognition per channel is greatly increased. Interlink Network Systems, Inc. is a provider of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) software and services including telephony integration that enable real-time information exchange, IVR, and voice/quality recording. www.ilinknet.com/ www.ivoice.com Contact: iVoice, Inc., Delores Serafin-Sloboda, investors@ivoice.com Jerry Mahoney, CEO, 732-441-7700, jerrym@ivoice.com
ITS to Deploy NSC Speech Recognition Engine Firmware in Enterprise Messaging Systems: ITS Telecom (Azur, Israel) developing and manufacturing PBX peripheral solutions and NSC (Natural Speech Communication ltd.) (Tel Aviv, Israel) have signed an OEM agreement in which ITS will deploy NSC's speech recognition firmware in its messaging products. This agreement will allow ITS to provide its customers speech enabled services such as auto attendant, voice activated dialing and voice activated voice mail. NSC specializes in speech recognition technology for telephony systems and multi-user services. NSC’s solution is based on hardware – PCI boards that are designed around dedicated processors (DSP). NSC’s unique solution allows very high density support at low cost and low power consumption. Established in 1994, ITS Telecom specializes in the development, manufacturing and marketing of a wide range of PBX Peripheral Solutions. Founded by the Elgadcom Group, one of Israel's leaders in Communications and Telecommunication. The company serves customers in more than 50 countries across the globe, from governmental to private institutions through a network of Representatives, Distributors and OEM Partners. ITS's wide array of DSP-based products include Unified Messaging Solutions Voice Mail Systems, Auto Attendants, Voice Announcers, Music/Messaging on Hold Devices and Access Control Door Phones, distributed and sold on all five continents. www.nscspeech.com www.its-tel.com Contact: Ido Yitzhaki, Director of Business Development and EMEA Sales +972-3-9519779 Mobile: +972-55-425880 idoy@nscspeech.com 972-3-5576866 Izik Slook, ITS CEO
Personica Intelligence Unveils Intelligent Assistant Platform: Personica Intelligence (Marlboro, MA) has introduced the Personica Intelligence (PI) platform. The PI platform is a toolkit that can be used by consumer electronics (CE) companies and broadband service providers to offer consumers unified, intuitive and instantaneous control of consumer electronics and Internet services from anywhere in their homes. PI combines natural interfaces, such as speech recognition and visual displays, with life-like intelligent personas to enable a variety of pervasive home applications for communications, infotainment and home automation. The PI platform enables "personicas" that combine natural interfaces with life-like personas to control CE devices and access internet information. These personicas keep track of consumers' preferences and allows them to use their voices to do a variety of things. It provides the optimal mix of natural speech recognition, visual display and tactile input to allow the creation of a wide variety of different personicas. www.pesonica.com Contact: Yogendra Jain, Personica CEO 508.787.9611, investors@personica.com
Telephone SPE Messaging – Application/Products/Partnerships
Rhetorical and Dialogos power email reading: Rhetorical has extended its relationship with Dialogos, the Greek specialist telecoms provider, to create 'Email by phone'. The service is the first of its kind in Greece and is available now to Greek customers using Internet Services by OTEnet, the local leading ISP. Launched at the Thessaloniki International Fair in Greece, the service offers users the chance to listen to their email and attachments then reply or forward them to another email address or even call the message sender straight back. Dialogos is Rhetorical's exclusive partner in Greece and Rhetorical has developed two voices (male and female) for the Greek market. The first Greek voice was Rhetorical's first non-English voice. www.rhetorical.com. Dialogos is a leading speech technology company in Greece. Specialising in speech recognition technology, the company was responsible for developing the first speech enabled applications and voice portals in Greece and Turkey. Dialogos' customers include Cosmote and Vodafone, the two largest mobile operators in Greece; OTE, the Greek PTT; and OTEnet, the largest ISP in Greece. The company is a member of the Intracom group and was founded in 1998. www.speech.gr. Dialogos' products include turnkey solutions for telecommunications and enterprise industries in the languages of the targeted geographical region (Greece, Turkey, Arabic countries and the Balcans) and a VoiceXML platform for the deployment of voice portal applications. Dialogos' services include hosting of speech-enabled applications and professional services (grammar and dialog design, transcription, analysis and tuning) for the development of in-house solutions. OTEnet S.A. (www.otenet.gr), the leading Greek IP (Internet Protocol) service provider, was established by the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization (OTE) in 1996 and it is the subsidiary through which OTE implements its business strategy in the fields of new technologies and IP services. OTE is the main shareholder of OTEnet with a shareholding of 80.2 per cent. Other shareholders include, the National Bank of Greece with a 10 per cent. stake and a number of public sector educational and research institutions with smaller stakes. OTE ranks amongst the top Groups of companies in Greece and the top ten telecommunications organizations in Europe. It extends its activities beyond the Greek frontiers into South-eastern European markets and the Middle East. OTE is the largest Greek Group, with numerous subsidiaries such as COSMOTE (mobile phone operator) and OTEnet which show impressive performances. OTE is listed on the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) and on the London and New York Stock Exchanges. Contact: Dialogos +30-28210-70250, Vassilis Digalakis, Chairman of Dialogos, info@speech.gr OTEnet General Manager of Technology, Strategy & Development, Elias Drakopoulos, +44 131 525 6800 Marc Moen, Marc@rhetoricalsystems.com
iVoice Platform Deployed by New Knoxville Telephone: Rural local exchange carrier New Knoxville Telephone has selected iVoice’s Speech Enabled Unified Communications Platform to provide local Voice Mail services to subscribers of its Cable TV and CLEC subsidiaries, NKTELCO and GoldStar Communications. iVoice bundles the Speech Enabled Auto Attendant, Voice Mail and Unified Messaging modules into one package. iVoice’s integrated software is a unified office solution that enables users to manage calls and multimedia messaging by using voice commands. Preston Meyer, general manager at New Knoxville Telephone investors@ivoice.com Jerry Mahoney, CEO, 732-441-7700, jerrym@ivoice.com
Prosodie Launches e-Mail Editor:
Prosodie is launching "E-mail Manager"
to process efficiently ingoing emails.
To meet the email growth in the interaction between clients
and companies, Prosodie offers a Mail Center AKIO
software-based semi-automatic processing tool. This solution
helps companies in processing their ingoing emails, 50% of
which remain without answer according to an IDC 2003 survey.
The "E-mail Manager" service: * routs email
demands to the right competences after analysis of the
context, * analyses the content of ingoing emails and offers
pre-defined answers to agents, * gives detailed statistics on
the service concerning the volume, the quality and the kinds
of demands. www.prosodie.com Contact:
Francine GAILLARD – Communication – +33 1 4684 1176
fgaillard@prosodie.com
Voice Mobility Adds VoiceXML Support: Voice Mobility International, Inc. (TSX: VMY, OTCBB: VMII and FWB: VMY)(Vancouver, BC), a developer and provider of carrier grade enhanced messaging solutions, announced the addition of VoiceXML support to its UCN 200 Enhanced Messaging product. In response to market demand, Voice Mobility enhanced the UCN 200 with a VoiceXML interface that interoperates with all VoiceXML-compliant speech recognition platforms. The UCN 200's new interface uses VoiceXML v2.0. By facilitating the exchange of information between existing speech recognition applications and the UCN 200, Voice Mobility gives telcos flexibility to integrate new enhanced messaging services, such as Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), into their existing infrastructure easily and affordably. It also gives those service providers that do not yet have speech recognition technology freedom to choose the speech platform that best meets their needs. The UCN 200's VoiceXML interface delivers an additional way for service providers to customize the interface to their subscribers' voicemail, while maintaining the functionality that their unique environment demands and the brand that their subscribers already identify with their voicemail service. It also allows service providers to offer new multi-modal enhanced services, which can be provided via both packet and circuit switched networks. In comparison with traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, the UCN 200's VoiceXML interface facilitates numerous cost-savings for service providers, including savings associated with faster development times, leveraging of in-house personnel and equipment resources, ease of integration with existing application server infrastructure, and improved customer self-service. Voice Mobility markets and develops next generation messaging solutions that provide all of the enhanced features and functionality of unified communications while ensuring integration with and replacement of existing voice messaging systems. Voice Mobility markets its software suite to telephone companies and service providers in both mature and new growth markets. www.voicemobility.com. www.nmscommunications.com Contact: Voice Mobility International Inc. Jay Hutton, 604-482-0000 Voice Mobility International Inc., Randy G.Buchamer, Chairman and CEO, investors@voicemobility.com
Three Nationwide Companies Select Z-Tel's Managed Voice and Data Solutions, Gain Significant Savings and a Single Source: Benchmark Medical, Compass and Innovation Luggage Consolidate Telecom Services for Multiple Locations on One Bill, Utilizing Z-Tel's Communications Z-Tel Communications, Inc. (Tampa, Florida), a wholly owned subsidiary of Z-Tel Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: ZTEL) and leading provider of local, long distance and enhanced telecommunications services, announces that three nationwide companies, Benchmark Medical, Compass Group North America and Innovation Luggage, have retained Z-Tel's Communications Briefcase(TM) services for either significant portions or all of their locations. The Communications Briefcase offers companies with multiple U.S. locations a comprehensive solution to consolidate and manage their telecommunications services often for a cost savings. The Communications Briefcase also offers customers consolidated account management, comprehensive billing (bills can be summarized at both regional and corporate levels), reporting and analytics and simplified product management across any number of locations. Customers can either create a customized package for all their locations or simply transfer their current services to Z-Tel. Z-Tel then consolidates and manages all aspects of the customer's communications services for each site. Z-Tel will provide most of Benchmark Medical's 350 medical clinics with local phone and enhanced voicemail services. Benchmark's business, which doubled in size and revenue last year, is ideally suited for the Communications Briefcase. As it grows exclusively through acquisition, Benchmark had a significant need to manage disparate, inherited telecommunications services across many locations. Benchmark is also considering Z-Tel's DSL offering. Compass has signed a three-year, non-exclusive agreement with Z-Tel for managed local telecommunications and enhanced voicemail services for nearly 200 of its catering and restaurant locations throughout the US. Compass chose Z-Tel over several major competitors. Z-Tel is providing all of Innovation Luggage's U.S. retail locations with managed local services. Contact: Sarah E. Bialk, Director of Investor Relations of Z-Tel, +1-813-233-4586, or ir@z-tel.com or Christine Attalla of PR Results for Z-Tel, +1-630-783-1024, or cattalla@prresults.org / http://www.ztel.com Tim Leffler, vice president, IT services for Benchmark
Telephone Operator Services – Applications/Products/Partnerships/Financials
BTSLogic Announces Availability of Speech-Enabled Directory Assistance Service: BTSLogic (College Park, MD) a provider of Multi-Modal Automated Directory Assistance solutions, announced the general availability of SEDA (Speech-Enabled Directory Assistance). The new service provides callers with automated directory assistance, recognizing the caller's spoken request and returning the desired number in naturally-voiced spoken English. The SEDA service is powered by BTSLogic's MultiModal VoxDA technology. It features LSSi's US telephone directory listing data, and uses Consolidated Operator Services' professional and efficient operator services for fallback. The new service provides a complete solution, enabling carriers to reduce deployment costs of traditional and enhanced directory assistance services. The SEDA service uses industry standards for network integration, speech application development, operator fallback, and billing. The standards supported include SS7, RLT (Release Link Trunking), PAM, VXML, and AMA. The result is a robust and scalable directory assistance solution that not only lowers operator and network transport costs, but is also flexible enough to allow rapid development and deployment of new features. The SEDA service uses LSSi directory data, an accurate and up-to-date directory of telephone listing data in the US, to provide a solution that covers 150 million residential, business and government listings in the US. Using proprietary mechanisms developed by BTSLogic -- and in use by more than 18 carriers around the world -- LSSi listing data is updated daily to assure the highest level of accuracy. SEDA is a complete service and includes operator fallback to ensure that every call is answered. When speech automation is unsuccessful, SEDA transfers the caller and the recorded request via SS7 RLT to a live operator agent at Consolidated Operator Services. BTSLogic (www.BtsLogic.com) is a leading provider of MultiModal Automated Directory Assistance solutions. BTSLogic is a joint partnership between LogicTree, Corp. and BTS Solutions, with the mission to provide Automated Directory Assistance solutions to North American carriers and operator service providers. LSSi Corp. (www.lssi.net) is the world's leader in developing and operating high-performance directory databases. The company has established a strong commercial presence in several important directory markets, including National Directory Assistance (NDA(R)) databases; International Directory Assistance Gateway and hosting solutions; customer name and address automation; wireless mobile solutions; desktop solutions for corporations and other large institutions; and numerous Enhanced Directory Assistance solutions. LSSi world headquarters are located in Edison, New Jersey. The corporation maintains development and operational facilities in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and Waynesboro, Virginia. LSSi's international operating companies, LSSi Italia SpA and LSSi UK Limited, are located in LaMezia Terme, Italy, and Birmingham, England. Consolidated Operator Services (www.consolidated.com) is part of the Consolidated Communications, Inc., family of companies with more than 100 years of industry experience. In addition to national directory assistance, Consolidated Operator Services also offers corporate operator services, message center services and wholesale and retail operator services. James Healy, Director of Product Management at LSSi Corp. Underdal, 301/220-3520 ounderdal@btslogic.com http://illinoisconsolidated.com Contacts: Ben Maldanado LogicTree (301) 220 3520 ben@logictree.com Niels-Arne Baden, CEO, BTS, and Fred Korangy, CEO, LogicTree, Rick Hall, director, Consolidated Operator Services
Telephone Tools – Products/Partnerships
VoiceGenie and Elan Speech Partner to Provide High-End Multilingual Speech-Enabled Solutions: VoiceGenie Technologies Inc.(Toronto, Canada) and Elan Speech (Toulouse, France) announced their partnership and marketing alliance to deliver high-end speech-enabled services to enterprises and carriers worldwide. The integration of Elan Speech's Text-to-Speech (TTS) offering for Telecom deployments will deliver additional support to VoiceGenie in their international growth and European involvement. The joint solution will provide the market with a comprehensive multilingual offering and Elan Sayso TTS. VoiceGenie's speech platform allows enterprises and telecom carriers to develop and deploy IVR (Interactive Voice Response) applications, speech-enabled services, and voice portals. Providing advanced infrastructure solutions and services necessary for the creation of VAD (voice activated dialling) and other speech applications, the platform allows users to retrieve Web information, make online transactions and manage personal communications (such as e-mail, voice mail and voice-activated dialling) quickly and easily, simply by speaking into any phone - anywhere, anytime. www.voicegenie.com www.elanspeech.com Contact: Cheryl Alden, 416-736-0905 calden@voicegenie.com Caroline Houel, Elan Speech +33 (0)5 62 24 71 22 chouel@elanspeech.com
NSC Announces New Version of the NSCBoard Server with Flexible Configuration Capabilities of Speech Recognition: NSC -- Natural Speech Communication Ltd., developer of hardware based speech recognition engine, has announced version 3.7 of the NSCBoard. The new version enables developers of speech driven services to configure the speech recognition resources on the board, use slot filling capabilities and write grammars in ABNF format. NSC has implemented a flexible configuration architecture allowing autonomous definition of the NSCBoard speech recognition resources. Each NSCBoard can be configured to support a combination of different types of speech recognition channels and languages according to application needs. Hence, sizing of the speech recognition engine is simpler, more efficient and can be utilized according to changing needs. The NSCBoard is supplied in three sizes -- 4, 12 or 30 DSPs. The NSCBoard-30 is a high density, cost-effective, DSP based board, designed to deliver up to 120 concurrent ASR channels in a single PCI slot. Each DSP is autonomous and can be independently configured for different language, vocabulary and grammar. Several ASR channels can run a single DSP, depending on the ASR task complexity. Available immediately is the NSC Development Kit including: NSCBoard-4 -- NSCBoard with 4 DSPs, NSCEngine -- NSC's speech recognition engine, NSCServer -- server software for windows NT / 2000 and Linux and a grammar compiler. NSC specializes in speech recognition technology for telephony systems and multi-user services. NSC's solution is based on hardware -- PCI boards that are designed around dedicated processors (DSP). NSC's unique solution allows very high density support at low cost and low power consumption. The board performs all the recognition operations without the need for Pentium resources, eliminating the need for additional computing resources. www.nscspeech.com Contact: Ido Yitzhaki, Director of Business Development and EMEA Sales +972-3-9519779 Mobile: +972-55-425880 idoy@nscspeech.com
VoiceGenie and Telisma Partner to Drive the European VoiceXML Market: VoiceGenie Technologies Inc and Telisma, announced their signing of a worldwide license reseller agreement. Under the terms of this sales and technical partnership, VoiceGenie will integrate Telisma's voice recognition technology into its speech platform and resell Telisma's ASR product line. VoiceGenie and Telisma are currently working on a joint VoiceXML platform, compliant with the VoiceXML 2.0 standard. The speech solution, which is based on a client-server distributed architecture, will offer support for all 12 major European languages. It will allow operators and access providers to develop and implement voice portals, company directories, partial automation of incoming calls for call centers and other speech-based services. www.voicegenie.com. www.telisma.com Telisma's products are based on technology stemming from over 15 years of research within France Telecom R&D. Telisma's product and services enables thereby operators and service providers to easily create and deploy large-scale user-friendly speech-enabled services at lower costs for enterprises and the general public. The technology commercialized by Telisma has been deployed for mass-market services by major European companies since as early as 1991 (CNET version). More than 35,000 ASR ports in telecommunication market have been deployed with Telisma technology at France Telecom, Orange France, Afone/ France Television Publicite, Macif Insurance, DHL, TF1 (French Number 1 TV Channel), etc.Contact: Cheryl Alden, 416-736-0905 calden@voicegenie.com or Telisma, Pascale Garreau, +33 (0)1 42 45 45 91 pgarreau@telisma.com
Embedded Telematics – Products/Applications/Partnerships/Financials
Smart move from BenQ – Their new smartphone, camera & PDA Includes upgraded smARTwriter ART’s latest smARTwriter powers entry of BenQ’s new P30 smartphone to European and Asian Markets: ART Advanced Recognition Technologies, Inc. announced that an upgraded version of its advanced natural handwriting recognition software, smARTwriter, has been chosen by BenQ for their new P30 smart phone, which includes camera and PDA functionalities. The upgraded smARTwriter provides greater ease in using handwriting UI with both major European and Chinese. www.artcomp.com www.benq.com Contact: Betty Finkelstein, Marketing Communications, ART Advanced Recognition Technologies, Inc. Tel: +972 3 6427242 ext. 116 Mobile: +972 64 700018 mailto:betty@artcomp.com
Babel Reads SMS, Symbols and Messages for Imagetalk: Babel-Infovox AB announced that Imagetalk has selected Babel-Infovox’ embedded Text-to-Speech solution (PocketBabil) for its mobile communication tool on Imagetalk Pocket and Imagetalk Smartphone applications. The Babel-Infovox speech synthesis integrated in these products supports all major European languages, including Nordic. Imagetalk has been designed for those of us with severe speech or language disorders. Imagetalk Pocket currently runs on Fujitsu Siemens Loox (both 600 and 610) and on HP iPaq 2210 PDA-devices. It is an integrated solution for augmentative and alternative communication with the help of symbols and Babel-Infovox’ speech synthesis. Soon to arrive on the market is Imagetalk Smartphone, a Symbian-native button-based version of the Imagetalk messaging application, also with built-in PocketBabil speech synthesis. It combines mobile and face-to-face communication and calendaring in a small device, which makes it extremely easy to carry along. The list of possible devices include Nokia 3650, 6600 and N-Gage, but also Symbian Series 60 phones from other manufacturers, such as Siemens and Samsung. PocketBabil is the embedded text-to-speech version of Babil, a high-quality multi-lingual TTS synthesizer, based on Babel’s Multi Band Resynthesis Overlap Add (MBROLA) concatenative algorithm. This patented technology is available in 18 languages. PocketBabil can produce any utterance in a given voice or language and features high segmental quality and fluidity of speech. It is a software only system that requires very few hardware resources in terms of memory and computational load. This TTS solution enables extremely fast development of new voices and languages. The PocketBabil is an appropriate speech solution for portable devices and embedded equipment, and has been released in 18 languages: Modern Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch (Belgian & Dutch), Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian & Portuguese), Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, UK & US English. The software currently runs on WinCE, Symbian, Linux environments or on platforms without OS. PocketBabil is also available for Texas Instruments’ high-performance, power-efficient OMAPTM wireless processing platform, which is delivering voice and multimedia enhanced applications for 2.5G and 3G wireless handsets and PDA’s and other multimedia enhanced devices. Imagetalk Oy is a software company that develops and sells software for building assistive devices for mobile and face-to-face communication, calendaring, speech therapy, and for learning to read, write and talk. The Imagetalk software interprets messages with the help of icons and speech synthesis. The Imagetalk solutions are for those with severe speech and/or language disorders. www.imagetalk.fi Juhani Selänniemi, CEO of Imagetalk www.babeltech.com Isabel Meurisse Babel Technologies +32 65 374 174 meurisse@babeltech.com
Silicon Wave and Clarity Technologies Inc. Announce UltimateBlue Audio For Bluetooth Headsets and Mobile Devices: Silicon Wave (San Diego, CA) announced the availability of its UltimateBlue Audio solution that combines Clear Voice Capture software from Clarity Technologies Inc. (Troy, MI) with Silicon Wave's single-chip UltimateBlue Bluetooth ICs. The solution eliminates the need for a costly DSP (Digital Signal Processor), and has been optimized to run on the 32-bit ARM7TDMI processor core, which is embedded in the Silicon Wave SiW3000 and SiW3500 chips. UltimateBlueAudio delivers a low-cost, high-performance audio solution for Bluetooth wireless devices. The addition of the UltimateBlue Audio to Silicon Wave's portfolio of products provides customers with a total audio solution for wireless headsets, phones and other mobile devices. Running the CVC audio algorithms and Silicon Wave's UltimateBlue Embedded Software stack, which includes headset and handsfree profile support, directly on the ARM7TDMI processor core embedded in the UltimateBlue single-chip ICs, reduces the total cost of a Bluetooth product while significantly enhancing its audio performance. UltimateBlue Audio is available exclusively from RF Micro Devices (Nasdaq: RFMD), Silicon Wave's global channel partner for its CMOS single-chip radio processor and stand-alone radio modem Bluetooth solutions. Silicon Wave is a leading provider of low-power, highly integrated RF communication system components for the global Bluetooth wireless market. Silicon Wave products and services include single-chip radio processors, stand-alone radio modems, software solutions and a baseband IP licensing program. Founded in 1997, the company was the first to deliver a fully qualified, single-chip radio modem for Bluetooth communications and first to achieve Bluetooth Specification Version 1.1 qualification for its products. www.siliconwave.com. Silicon Wave, Dave Bergevin, 858-404-7704 dbergevin@siliconwave.com Clarity Technologies Inc., Fred Nussbaum, 248-822-5122 fredn@claritytechinc.com Steve Brown, vice president of business development and product marketing for Silicon Wave
Voice Signal Technologies Ships On New
Samsung SCH-i600 Smartphone From Verizon Wireless
Voice Signal Technologies (Woburn, MA), announced that
the Samsung SCH-i600 is shipping with Voice Signal's Voice
Activated Phonebook (VAP) software and application
launching feature. The VAP software
automatically voice-activates the user's phonebook, letting
users dial or look up information by saying a name, with no
need to "train" the name beforehand. In addition,
the digit-dialing feature, pioneered by Voice Signal and
Samsung in 2002, allows users to dial any number simply by
saying the digits naturally. Also, users will be able to
launch any application on the phone using voice. For example,
a user can check appointments simply by saying, "Open
Calendar". Voice Signal's application includes
interactive voice prompts and text-to-speech (TTS) for
ease-of-use and hands-free, eyes-free operation. Following on
the success of the Samsung i700 launch on the Pocket PC
platform earlier this year, Voice Signal now pioneers voice
recognition technology on the Microsoft Windows Mobile for
Smartphone platform. The i600 joins millions of mobile phones
on the market worldwide shipping with Voice Signal's speaker
independent Voice-Activated Phonebook technology. Product is
available through Verizon Wireless' nationwide retail network
for $399 after rebate. www.voicesignal.com Contact: Mira Genser, Voice Signal Technologies, +1
(617) 513 7020 mgenser@voicesignal.com Peter Skarzynski, senior vice president of
Samsung's wireless terminals division
Embedded Appliances – Applications/Products/Partnerships/Financial
PocketSpeech Sayso, a high end multilingual text to speech solution designed for PDAs: PocketSpeech Sayso speech enables the world of mobility with a high quality, human-like text to speech, which fits a PDA's technical constraints. High end text to speech will relay a world of information usually limited by a tiny screen, and contribute to inventing a new way to access any textual information. PocketSpeech Sayso SDK allow to speech enable PDAs, in already 5 languages. With a natural sounding voice, text to speech empowers navigation systems on PDAs, picking and inventory management applications, productivity or entertainment software, speaking dictionaries, assistive tools for the visually impaired... Footprint, performances and quality have been optimised to speech enable PDAs with outstanding results*. Available for Windows CE 3.0, Windows CE.net and Windows Mobile 2003, PocketSpeech Sayso uses less than 16 Mb** of storage memory and approx. 5 Mb of working memory. It never exceeds 30% of CPU consumption and has a very short latency (<250 milliseconds) while preserving Elan Sayso's high end text to speech results. PocketSpeech Sayso is available in 5 languages (American English, French, German, Italian and Spanish) and new ones are under development. www.elanspeech.com/downloads/register2.asp * worst case benchmarks, done on an Ipaq / Xscale 400Mhz processor * text to speech core engine + database for one language at 22Khz sample rate www.elanspeech.com/demos/sayso.htm Contact: Caroline Houel, +33 (0)5 62 24 71 22 chouel@elanspeech.com
Fonix/Epson Speech Solution Selected by TopGrade for Chinese Electronic Dictionary: Fonix Corporation (FNIX) announced the availability of a speech interface solution on an educational electronic dictionary manufactured and sold by TopGrade, a Chinese manufacturer of embedded devices. TopGrade's device, Kinbible V2100, features the recently announced Fonix/Epson speech solution and is currently on the market. Fonix receives unit royalties from the sale of each device sold, primarily in the Chinese electronic device market. Educational electronic dictionary devices are growing in popularity in China and are expected to exceed a market volume of over 500,000 units per quarter. Through our partnership with Epson, Fonix has established a working relationship with TopGrade, located in Shenzhen, China, to implement Fonix speech interface solutions in products they manufacture and sell. As their first product offering in this partnership, TopGrade has implemented the Fonix/Epson speech solution in a palm-sized electronic dictionary for Chinese speakers. This educational tool is based on the Fonix/Epson speech solution, which bundles the Fonix DECtalk text-to-speech on Epson's processor chips. The Fonix/Epson solution is specifically designed for limited-memory devices. www.bible.com.cn Contact: Fonix Corp., Salt Lake City, Elizabeth Sweeten 1-801-553-6600 mediainfo@fonix.com Samuel Pang, executive director at TopGrade
NCR and ScanSoft Enter into Global Agreement to Speech-Enable ATMs Worldwide: NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) announced a global agreement with ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT) to embed ScanSoft’s RealSpeak Solo text-to-speech (TTS) engine within NCR’s APTRA Edge and APTRA Advance NDC self-service software. The agreement provides the tools for financial institutions to improve automated teller machine (ATM) access for visually impaired banking customers. By incorporating ScanSoft’s RealSpeak Solo TTS engine within its ATM units, NCR ATMs can deliver a higher quality of access and service to visually impaired and blind users. Using RealSpeak Solo, NCR ATMs can seamlessly convert dynamic text into natural-sounding speech. By inserting personal headphones into the ATM audio jack and swiping a bank card, users can conduct individual financial transactions and have on-screen displays, such as account balance, account fund transfers and other personal information, read back to them in an easy-to-understand synthetic voice. ScanSoft’s RealSpeak Solo TTS engine is available in multiple languages. www.ncr.com www.scansoft.com Contact: Marie Ruzzo, 617-428-4444 marie.ruzzo@scansoft.com Andrew Orent, VP of NCR’s Financial Solutions Division, Americas region.
ScanSoft Speech Technology Selected by Ubisoft For Use in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Jungle Storm: ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT) announced that Ubisoft, one of the world's largest video game publishers, has incorporated ScanSoft's embedded speech recognition software into its upcoming PlayStation 2 release, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Jungle Storm. Available early in the first quarter of 2004, Jungle Storm is the first title in the Ghost Recon series to incorporate voice commands, and it will be exclusively available for the PlayStation 2 computer entertainment system. Ubisoft Studio in France has licensed ScanSoft's Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) 1600 speech recognition software for German, Italian, French, Spanish, and U.K. and U.S. English languages to provide up to 160 voice commands that enable gamers to communicate with online teammates, give orders to computer-controlled members of the team, and interact through speech recognition with the game itself. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Jungle Storm is one of the first in a new generation of games and applications that use the power of speech recognition to provide advanced command and control of the gaming environment, as well as real-life interaction for gaming enthusiasts. The ScanSoft Games Software Development Kit for PlayStation 2: The ScanSoft Games Software Development Kit (SDK) for PlayStation2 is middleware. Designed for game developers, this SDK enables integration of speech recognition functions into games and edutainment titles. The Games SDK is based on the ScanSoft ASR-1600 2.0, a phoneme-based, medium vocabulary speech recognition engine. Speech recognition is well suited to numerous applications, including adventure games, role-playing games, and strategy games; moreover, speech enables increased player interactivity and an improved overall gaming experience. -- Accurate recognition - A phoneme-based speech recognition engine that uses proprietary signal processing techniques and speech recognition algorithms to provide accurate recognition in any environment. -- Speaker Independent Models - No requirement to train the system--the end user can simply plug in the microphone and start playing. End-users can even teach the system new commands for personal customization. -- Scalable Vocabulary - Using the ScanSoft BNF format, new vocabularies can be created. -- Gender independence - Option to select gender-dependent and gender-independent models, allowing optimization and maximum customization to application. -- Multiple Recognition Modes - Push-to-talk, automatic stop, open microphone, and continuous speech mode. Ubisoft is an international producer, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment products. Founded in 1986 in France, Ubisoft is now present on every continent, both through offices in 22 different countries including the United States, Brazil, Morocco, Germany and China and through sales of products in over 50 countries. www.ubi.com . ScanSoft's Embedded Speech Solutions (ESS) is a provider of speech technologies and applications used within automobiles, handsets, consumer devices, talking dictionaries and electronic gamesESS supplies its leading speech technologies and applications to companies worldwide, including Citroen, Clarion, Delphi, Ford, General Motors, Motorola, Nokia, Pioneer, Sony and Visteon. www.scansoft.com/embedded/ Contacts: International ScanSoft Belgium BVBA Vanessa Richter, +32-9-239 80 31 vanessa.richter@scansoft.com or U.S. Marie Ruzzo, 617-428-4444 marie.ruzzo@scansoft.com Vincent Greco, Producer of Jungle Storm, Ubisoft
Desktop – Products/Applications/Partnerships/Financials
Agfa introduces RIS solution in Germany: Building on its unrivalled integration expertise, Agfa has now introduced its leading QDoc RIS (Radiology Information System) also in Germany. It enables full context integration with the Agfa IMPAX as well as other PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System), HIS (Hospital Information Systems) or EPR (Electronic Patient Record) systems. This is yet another step in the international expansion of the Agfa IS solutions. Agfa's QDoc RIS includes a range of modules to assist healthcare providers in efficiently handling the radiology information workflow, from procedure ordering to results distribution. It delivers a comprehensive, extensively scalable solution that boosts healthcare provider as well as patient satisfaction. The Agfa Qdoc RIS modules can also be used individually as a perfect stand-alone solution, streamlining ordering and scheduling of appointments, patient registration, work lists, billing, medical and management reporting. Imaging departments can generate images, reports and billing data which are available throughout hospitals by linking them to a central HIS and/or EPR system. With Agfa's IMPAX WEB1000 web interface, these can also be made available outside the hospital. QDoc is the heart of the RIS and helps optimize workflow. It streamlines patient registration, modality work lists, transcription and billing. The advanced context integration of the QDoc PatientViewer with IMPAX or other PACS systems offers radiologists a highly desirable, complete workflow solution for reading and results reporting. With a single interface the user can access patient data from either side: entering the system from the RIS or from the IMPAX. QDoc interfaces with speech processing solutions to offer the latest in speech technology. Digital dictation and speech recognition considerably decrease report turnaround time. QpOrder is an enterprise-wide, easy-to-use solution for ordering examinations from the radiology department. QPlanner offers a premium solution for scheduling appointments by taking multiple resource availability of rooms, modalities, time, material and persons into account. The Agfa-Gevaert Group is one of the world's leading imaging companies. Agfa develops, manufactures and markets analogue and digital systems, intended mainly for the graphics industry, healthcare, non-destructive testing, micrographics, motion picture and photography markets. Agfa's headquarters are in Mortsel, Belgium. The company is active in 40 countries and has 120 agents throughout the world. Together they achieved a turnover of 4,683 million euros in 2002. www.agfa.com Contacts: Marcus Ostländer, Manager Marketing Systems Solutions, HealthCare Europe, tel.: +32 (0) 3 444 93 26 marcus.ostlander@agfa.com Geertrui De Smet, PR and Events Manager HealthCare, tel.: +32 (0) 3 444 73 06 geertruidesmet@agfapress.com Johan Jacobs, Corporate Press Relations Manager, tel.: +32 (0)3 444 80 15 johan.jacobs@agfa.com
Apple Speech Technologies: Apple Speech Recognition lets your Macintosh understand what you say, giving you a new dimension for interacting with and controlling your computer by voice. You don’t even have to train it to understand your voice, because it already understands you, from your very first word. You can speak naturally, without pausing or stopping. Apple’s leadership in speech recognition technology makes it possible — we’re bringing a whole new dimension to the user interface: speech. English Text-To-Speech: English Text-to-Speech (also known as Speech Synthesis) converts text to spoken words. Just imagine having this web page read aloud to you, or having information on your mac read to you over the phone! These, and more, applications are now possible with PlainTalk speech synthesis technology. Speech Recognition Features: Speaker independence—you don’t have to "train" the software. Continous speech—you can talk naturally without pauses between words. Flexible vocabulary that can be customized. Ability to function accurately in real-world environments using the "push-to-talk" feature. Text-to-Speech Features include: Have your computer speak the alert messages that appear on the screen. 22 different voices to choose from. Adjustable voice rate. The latest version of Mac OS X includes all the software needed to start using Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech. www.apple.com (800) 767-2775
Voice Print And CallMiner Announce Partnership: Voice Print International, a developer of innovative, integrated communications solutions for digital voice, data and screen recording and quality management, announced a partnership with CallMiner, Inc., a developer of audio mining, data analysis and trending solutions. Contact centers can now utilize CallMiner in conjunction with Voice Print’s full-time recording solutions to capture and derive actionable intelligence from data buried in each and every call. CallMiner’s speech recognition technology converts recorded conversations into text, which can then be searched and analyzed to uncover valuable business intelligence for trending and other purposes. CallMiner’s toolkit includes Trendminer and Tireless Supervisor. TrendMiner facilitates the analysis of sample call records or an entire database of recorded calls, resulting in graphical or numerical representations to reveal business trends, opportunities or threats. Tireless Supervisor evaluates calls based on a user definable set of rules and criteria. The application is ideal for segmenting calls by root cause and automatically scoring recorded calls by specific criteria. Tireless Supervisor listens to calls and returns a digital score on the content of the call – enabling supervisors to evaluate customer and agent behaviors. Organizations traditionally expend massive resources in telemarketing campaigns accompanied by exhaustive playback sessions in order to uncover business intelligence. By using CallMiner’s data mining capabilities in conjunction with Voice Print’s digital recording technology, businesses can immediately begin analyzing 100% of their calls. For example, call centers can highlight the number of calls where customers have canceled their accounts or mentioned a competitor’s name. Armed with this knowledge, CallMiner’s analytical tools can be used again to uncover the reasons why an account was canceled or what the customer found desirable in a competitor. The sudden increase of key words such as "cancel" and "complaint" could prompt notifications and reports to be sent automatically to management to initiate immediate remedial action. www.VoicePrintOnline.com or call 1-800-200-5430. www.callminer.com Phone: (239) 573 9670 Jeff Gallino, CEO of CallMiner, Andrew Marsh, Founder and Vice President of Voice Print International
Fonix Partners With a-technic to Provide DECtalk Text-to-Speech Technology to Disabled Technology Users: Fonix Corporation (OTC BB: FNIX) announces a cooperative technology partnership with a-technic, a non-profit research and development charity, to promote Fonix DECtalk text-to-speech (TTS) as a speech technology solution to clients and partners. a-technic researches and develops products for blind, low-vision and disabled technology users, then makes that technology available to other organizations to market and sell end-user products. By incorporating DECtalk into their computer platform, a-technic offers their manufacturing partners the most intelligible TTS voices available. Fonix DECtalk offers high intelligibility, low memory footprint, nine voices (four male, four female, one child) and multiple languages (US and UK English, European French, German, Castilian and Latin American Spanish). As a-technic's products are made available to their manufacturing partners for deployment to the user community, Fonix will receive royalty revenue from these sales. a-technic is a UK-registered charity specializing in technology to help people with disabilities. www.a-technic.net www.fonix.com Media Contact: Fonix Corporation, Elizabeth Sweeten, 1-801-553-6600, mediainfo@fonix.com John Batty, a-technic CTO
Parliant Corporation
Upgrades PhoneValet for Mac OS X; New Version Improves User
Experience, Brings Telephony to Other Applications; Now with
Address Book Dialing, iChat Integration
Parliant Corporation announced the availability of the
first major upgrade of PhoneValet, its inexpensive
multi-line-capable computer telephony solution for Mac OS X. PhoneValet
keeps track of your calls, dials numbers quickly and
accurately, tells you who's calling and keeps you in touch
with your calls while you're out. This upgrade is free to
current PhoneValet owners and includes the following
enhancements: -- Tighter integration with Address Book and
iChat; PhoneValet 1.1 supports dialing numbers
directly from Apple's popular Address Book application.
Additionally, PhoneValet 1.1 integrates smoothly with
Apple's iChat audio/video instant messaging program to
automatically set iChat's status to "on the phone"
when you're on the phone. -- Brings Telephony To All Your
Applications. PhoneValet 1.1 includes the ability to
dial from many third-party applications using new AppleScript
and "Apple Events dialing support. These services make
full use of PhoneValet's dialing rules that automate
long-distance and calling card dialing. Parliant provides
plug-ins and example scripts that automate dialing from
FileMaker Pro applications and Microsoft's Entourage. With PhoneValet
1.1, incoming calls can trigger AppleScripts you create.
This release includes additional scripts and samples: --
Streamlined User Experience; Responding to customer
suggestions, PhoneValet 1.1 has redesigned real-time
"quick searching" and improved sorting support.
Management of items is sharper, with improved export and
multi-select features. -- Panther Compatible. PhoneValet
1.1 supports Apple's latest operating system, Mac OS X
Version 10.3 "Panther". PhoneValet's updated user
interface takes full advantage of Panther's new look, and
Version 1.1 includes support for Panther's new Fast User
Switching technology. PhoneValet is a Personal
Telephone Assistant built from the ground up to harness the
power of Mac OS X. No modem needed. At just $129.95 (USD)
Additional lines are $89.95 each. www.parliant.com, 1-866-864-2334. www.parliant.com. PAN Communications Keri Bertolino,
978-474-1900 parliant@pancomm.com
Provox Announces VoxReports Speech Recognition Based Radiology Reporting Workflow Management: Provox Technologies Corporation demonstrated VoxReports, speech recognition based radiology workflow management solution at the 2003 89th Annual RSNA Meeting. Radiologists create comprehensive interpretations faster than ever before without changing the interpretation process. Provox combines speech recognition technology with a "rules engine" to speed the creation of a comprehensive radiology report. VoxReports programmatically interprets patient information and the exam procedure code to automate the reporting process. The result is radiologists are able to produce more reports per day at a lower cost. VoxReports takes radiology reporting to a new level of speed. It is a only speech radiology solution to provide an interface that allows reports to be rapidly created and sent for proofreading without having to even look at a computer screen. All operations are speech command driven with audio cues that verbally confirm that a command has been completed without having to use your hands. As radiologists quickly dictate reports, editors are automatically assigned specific reports to proofread. Through an editing module, corrections are made using a foot control and synchronized voice and text audio playback. To make corrections, a list of words close in pronunciation to the highlight word often makes editing a one-keystroke event. No rewinding of audio is necessary. Once a report is checked and edited, the radiologist is immediately alerted to review and sign the report. With power signoff, radiologists can electronically sign a group of reports with a single command. Lastly, VoxReports provides a web tool to monitor and manage both radiologist dictation performance and editor corrections per minute. This management tool allows system administrators to set performance benchmarks and work with the radiologist and editors to help them meet and exceed the group benchmarks. From multi-hospital and radiology practice settings to a single imaging center, VoxReports delivers a HIPAA compliant solution and claims the highest report accuracy, most advanced editing tools, and the fastest report production in the industry. Provox provides a suite of portable and desktop software and system solutions that is specifically designed for over 30 medical specialties in group practices, hospitals, and clinics. With over 75 integrations to practice management systems, billing systems, hospital information systems, radiology systems, and electronic medical records systems, Provox electronically automates medical documentation to significantly reduce the cost of creating, managing, and distributing medical documents. www.Provox.com. Contact: Steve Rothschild Provox Technologies Corporation 888.776.8691 ext. 3170 steverothschild@Provox.com
Provox Announces First Tablet PC-Based Medical Speech Recognition Solution: Provox Technologies (Roanoke, VA), a supplier of interactive speech recognition based medical documentation, workflow solutions, introduced the first tablet PC-based, speech recognition reporting solution designed for the mobile radiologist at the 2003 89th Annual RSNA Meeting. Radiologists dictate reports quickly using state-of-the-art speech recognition technology that operates on a tablet PC. Designed from the ground up as a wireless solution, reports are wirelessly routed and accessible virtually anywhere. Radiologists can create comprehensive interpretations faster than ever, while on the go or at home. The disconnected user feature enables radiologists to take important patient and order information with them, so that they can dictate reports at any location and automatically synchronize the report and profile data, once reconnected to the network. As reports are completed, an editor or a radiologist can check and edit a report, which increases the recognition accuracy. Radiologists can review reports and then use the batch signature feature to electronically sign a group of reports and automatically fax them to referring physicians. www.Provox.com Contact: Steve Rothschild Provox Technologies Corporation 888.776.8691 ext. 3170 steverothschild@Provox.com
RNIB and Rhetorical announce partnership at TechShare 2003: Rhetorical and the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) have announced a partnership that will increase information access for people with sight problems. Rhetorical's advanced text-to-speech (TTS) product rVoice will be used to deliver a wide range of current affairs and time-sensitive information, such as newspapers, magazines and TV listings, in a an audible format designed to be fully accessible to the UK's 2 million blind and partially sighted people. Although RNIB has lobbied publishers for many years to produce books, magazines and newspapers in large print, Braille and audio formats, the problem has remained that information recorded onto audio tape has been of poor quality, time consuming and expensive to produce, and has denied blind listeners the ability to 'scan read' the text quickly or to jump easily to items of interest. rVoice can provide male or female voices with a range of accents and dialects, including Scottish, Valley Girl and even Kylie-like Australian. rVoice will save RNIB a vast amount of time and effort. It would usually take one of RNIB's volunteers 17 hours to record the TV listings onto tape. Using Rhetorical's TTS technology RNIB can now do it in less than an hour. rVoice builds on RNIB's work with the DAISY Consortium. DAISY (Digital Access Information System) is an international partnership working towards a standard for navigable talking books (by linking audio to specific places in the text). rVoice will be used to create navigable audio versions of new publications with a dramatic reduction in the amount of time (and cost) needed to record the audio track. RNIB's own catalogue typically takes thirteen and a half days to record. Using rVoice the job can be done in just two and a half hours. RNIB and Rhetorical will be demonstrating the power of rVoice at TechShare 2003 on 20/21 November 2003, Jury's Inn Hotel, Birmingham www.techshare.org.uk www.rhetorical.com RNIB helps people with sight problems to live full and independent lives. 0845 766 9999 www.rnib.org.uk Steve Tyler, RNIB's Policy and ICT Access Ma
Sakrament TTS Being used on Reality TV in Russia: Sakrament announced that one of the leading non-state owned Russian TV Network company TNT has selected its TTS Engine to use in the TV reality-show. Sakrament company (Minsk, Belarus), the leading software developer in the sphere of speech recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies for the Russian language, announced that TNT TV Network has selected its TTS Engine to use in the TV reality-show. TNT is among the first in the World and the first in Russia’s TV Network Company has begun using TTS technologies in its TV programs. TNT has placed an order for creating an exclusive TTS voice from samples of a well-known Russian speaker for further use jointly with Sakrament text-to-speech (TTS) Engine in its reality-show. TTS Engine is used in the TV show as an electronic show presenter, who takes an active part in the dialogue with the reality-show participants. The Russian, non-state owned television network ?N? is a the television network of a national scale, whose programs broadcast across five time zones on over 270 regional television broadcasting stations. The total potential audience of the network from Kaliningrad up to Vladivostok comes up to 80 million persons and the number of cities for broadcasting has exceeded 530. The signal of ?N? is distributed across 65 regions of the Russian Federation. Announcement of ?N? covers all of Russia’s largest cities. Over 270 independent regional broadcasting companies work in cooperation with TNT. The concept of the television network ?N? recognizes that while becoming a significant creative potential, the regional TV at the same time does not have sufficient stable financing, a balanced program policy as well as the newest technological facilities (particularly digital). All these elements are necessary for a successful construction of modern TV, and are offered by the network to its partners. Sakrament company was established in Minsk, Belarus, in 1994. Sakrament products, including Sakrament Text-to-Speech Engine (TTS) and Sakrament Speech Recognition Engine (ASR) provide the most natural communication solutions available for the Russian language. www.sakrament-speech.com Contact: Sakrament company, Alexander Ostapenko, 375 17/284-0650, ales@sakrament.com
OmniPage Update Adds Speech Features: ScanSoft Inc. released a new version of its OmniPage optical character recognition software that incorporates new speech technologies and improves the accuracy of converting scanned documents into electronic ones. With OmniPage Pro 14 Office, ScanSoft has incorporated its automatic speech recognition technology into the product. It allows a user to speak commands in order to initiate OmniPage workflow processes and to conduct proofing of documents by voice. The latest OmniPage release also makes use of ScanSoft's text-to-speech technology so that users can output converted documents or scans into speech in the form of WAV files. OmniPage came into the ScanSoft fold through the acquisition of Caere Corp. in 2000. OmniPage has become ScanSoft's main focus in the optical character recognition (OCR) arena, though it continues to offer an entry-level software product called TextBridge. With the OmniPage Pro 14 Office version, ScanSoft has redone the OCR engine to improve the accuracy of conversions. The new engine improves accuracy by about 35 percent compared to the previous version of OmniPage. The revamped software also can better recognize document formatting and more accurately convert formatting such as tables, columns and graphics into electronic form. In earlier versions, document formatting would become locked in place within an electronic document such as a Microsoft Word file. In the new release, the document formatting can be edited once converted into electronic form. OmniPage Pro 14 Office supports about 30 file formats, from Word and WordPerfect to XML and PDFs, and 119 languages. The client software runs on Windows 98 and higher and costs $599 for a fill version. Upgrades from earlier versions cost $199. www.scansoft.com
Voice Control Inc. will aid ophthalmologists: Voice Control Inc., (Dayton, Ohio), is preparing to launch new voice-control software that will give ophthalmologists technology that was originally developed for the military. The software, called VMR for Voice Medical Record, uses a speech recognition-based application that provides physicians a keyless-entry electronic medical records package. The Voice Control software will allow ophthalmologists to recite patient examinations in real time, creating medical records with accuracy that exceeds 99 percent. www.voice-control.com (937) 281-6387 Dave Latimer, dlatimer@voice-control.com Phil Parks pparks@voice-control.com
Vox2Data Medical Dictation Solution: Hospitals currently spend an average of $1 million to $3 million on outsourced record dictation, which then has to be filed, tracked, and archived. This consumes thousands of hours of staff time and is an additional cost to the hospital. If the forms are missing any fields, as often happens, the Medicare reimbursement can be delayed for months. Vox2Data's voice recognition solution allows the physician to dictate directly into the system. All required fields must be filled out or the software will prompt the doctor. This leads to fewer errors and faster Medicare payments. It speeds the process and saves outsourcing costs for dictation transcriptions. Having all the data in the system makes it far more portable and available for the departments and physicians who need to access it. Patient charts can be brought up on any computer that has the software in seconds. Vox2Data will develop and market the product into hospitals nationwide. The Enterprise Edition is scheduled for release in Q1 of 2004. Vox2Data creates software for physicians, practitioners, and clinics. Vox2Data currently offers single-physician solutions and products for automating office systems that focus on voice recognition and voice-activated software. The company has grown steadily since its creation in 1992 and now has over 400 doctors, chiropractors, and physical therapists using its software. www.vox2data.com Contact: Katherine Conners, President of Vox2Data, 800-795-6256
Wizzard Software Offers Products and Customization Services for Speech Enabling Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003: Wizzard Software (OTCBB:WIZD) announced that it will begin offering a Software Developer's Kit and Customization Services for businesses desiring to add speech recognition input and text-to-speech output to Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003. Wizzard's Voice Tools for SAPI allow developers to take advantage of Microsoft's updated speech recognition and text-to-speech engines included in MS Office 2003 and quickly add speech capabilities to InfoPath 2003, a new member to the Microsoft Office suite of products. Microsoft is touting InfoPath as a productivity enhancing solution allowing users to create easy-to-use forms, customized for their specific business, to reduce repetitious and inefficient data entry. Wizzard's Voice Tools for SAPI allow developers, VARs, system integrators and other Microsoft business partners to add speech recognition input to forms for their customers in all types of vertical industries including healthcare, insurance and financial. In addition to the SDK, Wizzard offers speech recognition and text-to-speech engines in 19 languages, a lexicon builder to customize the vocabularies specific to a form, and prepackaged vocabularies for the medical and legal industries. For businesses wanting to add speech to their forms Wizzard is also offering Customization Services whereby a business can submit a basic InfoPath form to Wizzard, receive a price quote, and have the form voice enabled by Wizzard's engineers in a matter of days. By using Wizzard's customization services, Microsoft business partners can focus on their customer, creating an efficient form based system using InfoPath, while Wizzard focuses on adding the speech interface, an area where it has years of experience and expertise. These partners are who Wizzard is targeting with its initial launch today of these new speech Customization Services and Voice Tools for SAPI SDK. Microsoft is investing $500 Million in partner programs for Office System solution development. Solution providers, systems integrators and other Microsoft partners around the world have praised InfoPath 2003 for its robust development platform and are using it to build more than 100 solutions in areas such as business process management (BPM) and automation, electronic forms, back-end system integration, migration and collaboration, as well as meeting the needs of customers in vertical markets that include healthcare, insurance and financial services. Wizzard feels that by adding speech input and output to forms created with Microsoft InfoPath 2003, businesses can expand on the productivity increases offered through InfoPath and save money by increasing the speech and efficiency of data entry on repetitive tasks. Right now, American businesses alone spend upward of $15 billion transferring data from paper-based forms such as loan applications and purchase orders to their computer systems, according to analyst estimates. Software makers are banking on a desire among businesses to trim those costs. Wizzard believes that by using speech as an input method users can now transfer paper based data to their computer systems faster and more accurately. Wizzard plans to offer its products and services through Microsoft's Office Marketplace and the Microsoft Office System Solution Directory. These two channels provide tremendous exposure for small and medium-sized solution providers seeking to showcase their Office System solutions to a worldwide market. Once accepted, Wizzard's product would be exposed to the 25 million visitors that come to www.microsoft.com each month. www.wizzardsoftware.com . Jeff Raikes, group vice president of Productivity and Business Services at Microsoft Corp
Wizzard Software Awarded GSA Schedule for Government Technology Procurements; Streamlines Government Purchases for Speech Recognition Tools and Services: Wizzard Software Corporation (OTCBB:WIZD) has been awarded a GSA Schedule by the General Services Administrations (GSA) for its Voice Tools software products and professional services. GSA Schedules are contract instruments utilized by technology/services providers and government agencies to facilitate procurement of goods and services from private-sector companies without the need for competitive bidding. The Wizzard Software GSA Schedule, which is effective from November 18, 2003 until November 17, 2008, is classified as a Federal Supply Service (FSS) 70 contract with Contract Number GS-35F-0099P. This contract allows government organizations (federal, state and local) to more easily acquire Wizzard Software speech related products and professional services. As a GSA contractor under FSS Schedule 70, Wizzard Software now directly provides an array of speech recognition and text-to-speech products and services, including software, training and support. Any agency of the U.S. Government may take advantage of Schedule 70 task orders to secure products and services in a variety of areas supported by Wizzard Software. GSA Schedules closely mirror commercial buying practices by providing government customers access to state-of-the-art, high-quality commercial services and products at volume discount pricing on a direct-delivery basis. GSA Schedules also offer the potential benefits of shorter lead-times, lower administrative costs and reduced inventories. Wizzard will be adding several of its commercially distributed speech recognition engines and text-to-speech products to its GSA Schedule in the near future. Wizzard Software's current government customers are agencies within the Department of Defense and the U.S. Postal Service. 1-412-621-0902. www.wizzardsoftware.com Contact: Arthur Douglas and Associates, Art Batson, 407/478-1120 (Investor Relations)
Data Entry – Applications/Products/Partnerships/Financial
CooperVision Selects Voxware's VoiceLogistics for Warehouse Labor Optimization; Pilot Program Delivers Outstanding Results: Voxware, Inc. (OTC: VOXW) announced that CooperVision, a division of The Cooper Companies (NYSE: COO) and a global leader in specialty soft contact lenses, has selected VoiceLogistics for voice-directed picking operations in its Rochester, N.Y. distribution center. CooperVision conducted a rigorous analysis of alternative suppliers, followed by a live pilot program with VoiceLogistics in their Rochester facility. CooperVision very quickly saw productivity rates 150% greater than their targets, with near-perfect accuracy levels. User acceptance was phenomenal, so they believe that performance will get even better with more practice. CooperVision, Inc. is headquartered in Lake Forest, Calif., and has manufacturing facilities in Hamble, England; Rochester, N.Y.; Huntington Beach, Calif.; Helsinki, Finland; and Norfolk, Va. The company markets a broad range of contact lenses, including toric lenses, a specialty lens designed for the treatment of astigmatism. CooperVision is the leading manufacturer of toric lenses in the world, and is the third largest manufacturer of contact lenses in the United States. www.CooperVision.com www.voxware.com Contact: 609-514-4100, info@voxware.com Steve Gerrard, 609-514-4100 x 4110, Joseph Stannard, CooperVision VP of Logistics
Base Technology – Products/Partnerships/Financial
Lucy and Graham : British couple to join the Elan Sayso family: After French, US English, German, Italian and Spanish, the Elan Sayso family welcomes a new language, to address a dynamic market in the field of telephony services and entertainment software. The simultaneous launch of both female and male voices aims to answer the increasing demand from customers looking for enhanced interactivity using different genders. This demand is particularly identified in the entertainment environment where the consumer needs to clearly identify the personalities, through different voices, and also in telephony services where different "actors" will help to clearly distinguish menu and content. The production of Lucy and Graham in parallel fully benefitted from the maturity of Sayso technology and the associated production tools designed by Elan Speech, to rapidly produce new voices, to add to the standard product offer or as specific brand voices. www.elanspeech.com/demos/sayso.htm Contact: Caroline Houel, Elan Speech +33 (0)5 62 24 71 22 chouel@elanspeech.com
Nuance Expands Vocalizer 3.0 Text-to-Speech Offering with the Introduction of Canadian French Voice and Other Product Enhancements: Nuance (Nasdaq:NUAN) introduced a new Canadian French text-to-speech (TTS) voice, updated North American English voices, and a number of other enhancements to its Nuance Vocalizer 3.0 text-to-speech software including: improved name pronunciation, reduced memory utilization, expanded handling of terms from key vertical markets, and broader operating system support. More than 200 customers in the financial services, telecommunications, travel and utilities industries are using Vocalizer TTS software from Nuance. Nuance Vocalizer converts text in a database -- such as an airline's flight schedule information -- into spoken words, allowing companies to automate the delivery of dynamic information over the phone. Moreover, Vocalizer can reduce the costs associated with recording the prompts needed for automated speech applications. Professional prompt recording can cost more than $800 per hour, with an application taking weeks to record and edit in a professional studio. Therefore, a reduction in the number of recorded prompts can have a significant impact on application cost and deployment time. More than 200 companies use Nuance Vocalizer text-to-speech software across a range of languages, applications and industries. These companies include, among others, Countrywide Financial and Washington State Department of Transportation. Partners using Vocalizer include Edify, Intervoice, Gold Systems, Workforce Technologies, Amcom Software and ISx. Now, the human-like sound of Vocalizer TTS is also available in Canadian French. To ensure accurate and natural pronunciation, this new offering includes recordings of Canadian public places (government locations, libraries), financial, currency and stock information, as well as airline industry terminology specific to Canada (airline names, cities and flight numbers). It also includes recordings and special handling for English names, to ensure good performance for the bilingual Canadian environment. In addition to the new Canadian French voice, dictionary and other enhancements to Nuance Vocalizer 3.0 include: * Updated North American voices: Both the male and female Nuance Vocalizer 3.0 North American TTS voices have been updated for more natural output and to include all of the latest TTS enhancements from Nuance. * Improved names pronunciation -- Enhancements to Nuance Vocalizer 3.0 reduce pronunciation errors associated with infrequently used person names by 25%. The enhanced version builds upon the proven name pronunciation database that was originally introduced in Vocalizer 3.0. Nuance Vocalizer 3.0's extensive dictionary includes more than 97% of people names based on U.S. census data. It also handles business names, street names, and addresses naturally. * Reduced memory utilization: Recent optimizations have reduced memory requirements by 25%, enabling more cost-effective TTS deployments. *Expanded coverage of industry-specific terms and prompts: A key advantage of Vocalizer 3.0 has been its "out-of-the-box" coverage of key prompts and industry-specific terms, acronyms and abbreviations for applications used in the financial services, travel, telecommunications and transportation industries. The recent enhancements to Vocalizer 3.0 enable companies to deploy even more effective applications through increased coverage of industry-specific words and phrases. * Broader operating system support: In addition to the Windows and SPARC Solaris operating systems, Nuance Vocalizer 3.0 now also supports AIX to enable companies with IBM DirectTalk platforms to take advantage of its TTS features. Other long-standing advantages of Nuance's TTS offering include: * Nuance Speak As One: Nuance's Speak As One offering is a set of technologies and services that enables the same voice to be used for TTS and those prompts that must be recorded. The offering also allows for the tuning of transitions between the two. This results in a single, high-quality voice and "personality" throughout the system and a seamless, more conversational and satisfying caller experience. * Rapid creation of custom voices: Many companies use a specific voice talent or celebrity as their spokesperson and want to use that same voice in their speech applications. Within months, such special voices can be added to Nuance Vocalizer 3.0 to create a caller experience that leverages this unique personality. * Support for open standards: Nuance Vocalizer supports industry standards such as the Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML), Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) and the Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP). * Intelligent email pre-processing: Vocalizer 3.0 leverages an email pre-processor that filters out unneeded header and routing information from emails for efficient email reading and unified messaging applications. In addition, Nuance Vocalizer properly pronounces and communicates sender, subject, date and other relevant information. * Support for Nuance's patented and proven distributed architecture: Nuance's patented distributed architecture enables a speech system to load balance between servers to best use all available hardware resources, thus reducing hardware costs. Load balancing also minimizes downtime because when one hardware server in the network fails, the load will automatically shift to other servers that are online. Nuance's patented distributed architecture has been deployed at hundreds of customer sites over the past seven years. Nuance now offers a total of 18 TTS languages including: Vocalizer 3.0 North American, UK and Australian English, Canadian French, and-via Nuance partners-Brazilian Portuguese, European French, European Spanish, Dutch, Danish, German, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Cantonese Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Norwegian and Swedish. The Canadian French version of Nuance Vocalizer 3.0 is generally available now, and the other Vocalizer 3.0 enhancements will be generally available by the end of November. Pricing is available upon request. www.nuance.com Contact: Gwen Murphy, 650-847-7131 gmurphy@nuance.com
ScanSoft Introduces Kyoko; A Female Japanese Voice for Embedded and Network-Based Text-to-Speech Applications: ScanSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT), introduced "Kyoko," a new Japanese text-to-speech (TTS) voice for its RealSpeak Solo 1.0 TTS for embedded applications and Speechify 3.0 TTS software for network-based applications. Kyoko is the latest voice in ScanSoft’s TTS portfolio and provides a natural-sounding voice that accurately pronounces dynamic text-based information for embedded and network-based TTS applications. Using TTS, developers can more quickly deploy applications and decrease costs by reducing the need for pre-recorded audio. In telephony applications, businesses can use Speechify Kyoko TTS to repurpose existing data for a mobile customer base and access information instantly to deliver dynamically changing information in an audio format for each caller. For embedded applications, such as in vehicles, RealSpeak Solo Kyoko TTS can be integrated into handsets and other mobile devices to confirm voice-dialing commands and deliver SMS and email messages by voice. RealSpeak Solo Kyoko can also be embedded into navigation systems used in automobiles to provide drivers with turn-by-turn driving directions. Using RealSpeak Solo Kyoko, information that resides on a device can be played back in a natural-sounding Japanese voice. RealSpeak Solo Kyoko can be used in applications that also rely on ScanSoft’s embedded speech recognition for command and control functionality and other features on a device. RealSpeak Solo Kyoko can be used in a number of different embedded applications such as: Navigation – Confirm street names and addresses to provide detailed driving instructions from a navigation system embedded within a vehicle; Voice-Activated Dialing – Read back contact names stored on a cell phone or smart phone; Electronic Games – Customize commands by saying individual player names or other unique details; Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) – Provide personalized account information for visually impaired and blind users; SMS to Voice – Alert users of incoming text messages and read those text messages aloud; Industrial Automation – Confirm scanned product names for inventory control; MP3 Players – Read back artists and song titles stored in an MP3 player. Speechify Kyoko is appropriate for large-scale deployments of network-based applications that deliver real-time or personal information to callers. Its RealSpeak Solo, ETI-Eloquence, and TTS3000 TTS engines support more than 24 languages and are appropriate in mobile, automotive, game and PC/multi-media environments that require a memory footprint ranging from 100KB to 80MB. Network-based Speechify and RealSpeak TTS engines combine to offer 23 languages and 39 male and female voices. In addition, customers can also take advantage of ScanSoft’s Virtuoso Custom Voice Program to create a custom voice for their embedded or network-based TTS application, which can also be specifically tuned for a dedicated application domain, such as navigation. www.scansoft.com Contact : Marie Ruzzo, ScanSoft, (617) 428-4444, marie.ruzzo@scansoft.com
AVIOS has selected Ron Owens of Intervoice to serve on its board of directors. Tom Houy joins Clarity from IBM as vice president marketing for Clarity Technologies Inc. as well as taking on the roll as general manager of ClarityLabs where he will be responsible for the delivery and sales for all ClarityLabs services. He will report directly to Fred Nussbaum, executive vice president marketing and business development and president, ClarityLabs. Dave Doney joins Clarity from Agere Systems as Senior Director of Sales and will be responsible for sales in the US with an emphasis on automotive sales in the US and abroad for all appropriate CVC products. He will report directly to Dave Brown, executive vice president, sales. Edify Corporation has appointed Marie Amoruso Jackson as vice president of worldwide marketing and Mark Fournival as vice president of worldwide sales to extend the global market outreach of Edify's voice and speech applications. Leon Garza has left NetByTel where he was CEO.
NSC ASR Approach: NSC (Natural Speech Communications) is a Tel Aviv based company whose approach to providing ASR is quite different than the approach that is utilized by other base technology suppliers. Rather than having the ASR software reside on a Pentium, NSC Speech has implemented it on a DSP board. This approach has some significant advantages over the Pentium software approach that is utilized by the other ASR suppliers. NSC Speech is able to pack 120 ASR ports on a single PCI board. This provides a clear density advantage when compared with alternate software approaches that require an external speech server for every so many ports. The NSC approach yields a significant cost advantage. For starters, the base licensing per port price is approximately one-third of the price of that from the other base technology suppliers. When you add in the cost of the speech server replication, a factor of five and higher is likely. From a technical perspective, the NSC approach provides superior performance also. Each NSC ASR is a full recognition port. This is in contrast with many of the implementations that provide energy detection ports up-front. These energy detection implementations are done to save money. The tradeoff is that they create latency problems and false overstrikes. Extraneous noise is detected as speech and overall performance degrades. Energy detection configurations are also extremely difficult to size accurately. As serious carrier deployments occur, the cost of the base ASR license will become much more of an issue than it is today. When you have persona-oriented user interfaces that cost over $10K per port, it’s not particularly important whether the ASR license costs $150 or $450 per port. As the speech industry matures from chasing a Bentley market to addressing a Toyota market, the NSC ASR approach will be validated. Pretty attractive approach – costs significantly less, takes less space and the technical performance is better www.nscpeech.com Contact: Ido Yitzhaki - Director of Business Development and EMEA Sales Natural Speech Communication ltd. Tel: +972-3-9519779 Mobile: +972-55-425880 idoy@nscspeech.com
Neal Bernstein leaving NetByTel: Neal Bernstein is one of the true industry pioneers, not the SpeechTek Awards kind. I've known Neal for a number of years and I identify him as someone that has a quite unique set of entrepreneureal skills that blend high intelligence, knowledge of the market, enthusiasm, openness, vision and pragmatism in a positive way. His career in the speech area includes successfully launching businesses in the desktop, messaging and outsourced IVR. I can think of very few individuals in the speech industry that have the experience and credentials that Neal has. I'm interested in seeing where he goes next. I would be inclined to bet my money on the company that gets involved with Neal. nbernstein@adelphia.net 561-750-6199.
Applications drive market growth: A fundamental truism is that it is the applications that make a product/service successful. The capabilities of the hardware/software are irrelevent by themselves. Admittedly, having applications that are potentially useful and that customers would be willing to pay for and use does not guarantee success. A mechanism to sell and support the product/service is still absolutely essential. This basic application truism has invariably applied to every historical technological innovation (printing press; telephone, phonograph, TV, cellular, video phone, fax, PC, Internet). Not sometimes, but all of the time.
Much of the speech industry does not really appear to understand this truism. 90% of the industry appears to be focused on tools for creating applications. The industry challenge is to create applications that are attractive to the user. This challenge is not going to be met by motivating more unqualified people to create applications. Statisticly, one billion monkeys on pianos could create Beethovens 5th Symphony, but aside from the odds being against this, it might not even be noticed.
Branding over the telephone: I recently had a dialog with an executive of one of the leading speech vendors re branding. It was apparent that this executive was totally committed to the entire telephone branding/persona concept nonsense. As a result, the dialog was not a rational one since I was asking him to reject beliefs that he held quite dear and had strongly committed to. The basic "argument" was that I wasn’t knowledgable enough to understand or fully appreciate the basic concept of branding and that well known enterprises were embracing the branding/persona concept. I thought that the point of well known enterprises embracing the branding/persona was interesting. The leading vendors clearly position themselves as being the ultimate experts in speech and the appropriate applications of speech. In light of this, it is a bit difficult to accept that the rationale for the well known enterprises embracing the branding/persona stuff as anything more than them doing what the leading speech vendors tell them to do. This is cause/effect and it is pretty apparent what the cause is. The leading speech vendors are hyping this stuff and some of the enterprises are buying into it. Just who are these well known enterprises? The ones publicized most by the vendors is sort of telling. Sprint; MCI/Worldcom; United Airlines; Sears; AOL; British Airways; Amtrak; The only argument that I heard that made any sort of sense was that "major enterprises are spending millions of dollars on telephone branding". This is what it is all about. A way to obtain short-term revenue. My view is an uncomplicated one: At best, branding over the telephone is harmless. Given the limitations of self-service that exist today, it invariably creates a caller backlash situation. When the caller finally goes to an agent and recognizes that C-TI has not been implemented, they become offended by the fact that the enterprise spent all of this money on creating a persona and ignored a basic call automation requirement. The combined market for Maserati, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin, Morgan, Maybach, Alfa, Lambourghini, etc. is less than 0.1% of the entire automotive market. The industry needs a Toyota strategy.
Road Test: Next Generation Voice Navigation: For those of you who haven’t paid attention to voice navigated applications lately, a great deal has been happening. Voice recognition and text-to-speech technologies have improved, and handset processing speeds and memory are now powerful enough to support richer client-based applications. At the center of this confluence is the first speaker-independent voice activated phonebook (another term for VAD) resident on a device, powered by a small company called Voice Signal Technologies (VST).
I tested the Samsung SPH A600 phone (Sprint) and the SPH i700 Pocket PC (Verizon Wireless). In the case of the phone, the application is pre-installed. On the Pocket PC, the application has to be installed, mainly to support synchronization with the PC. The applications supported by VST are all speaker independent and include: voice activated dialing, digit dialing, and voice-driven feature navigation/application launch. I mainly focused on the VAD application. On the phone, VAD supports any name in the user-programmed contact list, while on the Pocket PC, the full address book is supported. To really put this thing through its paces, I loaded 5,000+ contact names into the Pocket PC. The user launches the application by pressing the dedicated or soft key, and speaks a command to dial by name or digit. A voice comes back to confirm the name or offers an N-best choice list and when prompted composes the number.
Overall, the application performs admirably. Using the large contact database on the Pocket PC, accuracy is in the 70% range – not bad, but there are a lot of "like" names on a database of this size. The improved performance is delivered by VST’s focus on something called the "Task Completion Rate" in addition to recognition accuracy. The digit dialing feature performs very reliably, performing especially well in noisy environments compared to other solutions I have tested. Still, don’t expect this to work where there are competing "voices", such as kids in the back of the car or in airports.
I would say that VST’s latency is better than what I have experienced with network-based solutions, but the app still gets hung up on large databases, especially when you get into N-best mode. I believe TTS response time has been improved in a recent software upgrade for some of the devices.
VST has accomplished a great deal, not only on the technology side but getting the application into numerous devices – about six Samsung models (Sprint, Verizon, SK Telecom) and the Motorola V60t (Cingular). The carriers are being rather cautious, having done little to advertise this application so far. And Cingular has decided to offer only the digit dialing feature on the Motorola device at this time. There have been some bugs with the application, and most early users have had to deal with a couple of patches and software upgrades.
I also think there’s work to do on the user interface. For example I think there’s one too many steps required before one is actually connected – it’s a minimum 15-second process. Speed dialing takes a lot less time, although VAD is clearly safer and more convenient while driving. Another beef is that unlike network-based solutions, you have to launch the application each time you want to dial a number.
My main area of disappointment, however, has to do with the OEM implementation rather than VST’s technology. For example, the Samsung devices do not presently ship with a way to get a large number of names into the phone’s address book, other than getting calluses on your thumbs. With the fewer than 20 names that a typical user is prepared to manually input, the application is significantly under leveraged. On the Pocket PC device, use of the cradle and ActiveSync means that your full contact list can be brought into the device. But frankly, I still find Pocket PC devices numbingly unintuitive. Can someone please tell me how to turn the damn thing on and off? Even more annoying – when the battery on the Pocket PC runs completely down, you have to re-install the application. Who will put up with that?
I have been following voice-activated applications for more than ten years, since the early days of Wildfire, and the progress is truly remarkable. Another example of Moore’s Law catching up with wireless. I think the future of voice activated applications will become increasingly centered around the client, although the network can still play a role as well in a hybrid implementation. Over time, I think voice navigation of PIM applications will become a standard, device-centric feature, rather than a separate, network based service sitting in its own silo that users have to pay for. I applaud VST for advancing the ball on voice-driven applications and the OEMs for taking the plunge. Now let’s focus on delivering the total solution, and maybe speech-based apps will break out of niche mode. www.m-ecosystem.com
Mark Lowenstein, Managing Director, Mobile Ecosystem, (781) 416-WRLS m.lowenstein@m-ecosytem.com The above article was reprinted from the Fall issue of "Lowenstein’s Lens on Wireless"
Vendor Sues Analyst: First time that I ever saw this. McGee-Smith Analytics got sued by Amcat for publishing a report that Amcat claimed libel and defamation in connection with misrepresentation of Amcat and its products in a recent report about predictive dialing and FTC regulatory requirements, published and promoted by McGee-Smith Analytics. Amcat www.amcat.com/pdfs/McGeeSmithSettlement.pdf not only got an injunction ordering McGee-Smith Analytics to cease distribution of the report, but also a public apology, with no reservations, from McGee-Smith Analytics www.mcgeesmith.com/html/press_release_october_16__2003.html Virtually all of the analyst sueing during the last couple of years has been by government agencies that are enforcing laws that are intended to protect against criminal behavior of the analysts. The suit against McGee-Smith Analytics appeared to be more about performing sloppy work and misrepresenting it, than real criminal activity. What McGee-Smith Analytics appeared to do was simply compile vendor claims without doing any work to validate that the claims were indeed correct. Bad stuff, but not really that different than what most of the industry analysts do - simply parroting what the vendors are saying. Good for Amcat!
The following two articles were published in U.S. newspapers this last month:
Times Picayune, LA - Nov 16,
2003
Southern Drawls Confuse La. Phone
System: SHREVEPORT, La. - Southern drawls have thwarted
voice recognition equipment used by the Shreveport Police
Department to route non-emergency calls. A switchover to a
lower-tech, touch-tone system — in which callers hear a
voice recording they can respond to by pressing a different
number for each division — is scheduled for Monday, said
spokeswoman Kacee Hargrave. The voice-recognition system
asked people to name the person or department they wanted.
More often than not, the system just didn't understand, and
they wound up at the wrong place, said Capt. John Dunn, who
oversees police communications. "In Louisiana, we have a
problem with Southern drawl and what I call lazy mouth.
Because of that, the system often doesn't recognize what
(callers) say," he said. Interim Chief Mike Campbell
knows all too well how frustrating the voice recognition
system can be. "I can count on one hand when I have been
transferred to where I've wanted to go, and I know the
system. I can imagine how frustrating it would be for a
citizen," he said.
Phone System Fails to Perceive Southern Drawl: Anyone who admires the fabulous efficiency of a friendly "y'all" -- or, even better, the perfectly calibrated symmetry of "all y'all" -- will surely blanch at the troubles they have been having in Shreveport, La. Shreveport's police department had the misfortune of buying a fancy voice recognition phone system obviously designed by someone lacking an understanding, much less an appreciation, of a southern patois.
The machine had no idea that White is pronounced "why-ut." Police Capt. John Dunn says "lazy mouth" syndrome twists the words. But the officers were not about to start enunciating like Yankees to please some machine.
"I would ask, and it would say, 'Did you say so and so?' " lawman Mike Campbell recalled. "And I'd say, 'No.' "
Campbell got his revenge when he was named interim police chief: He got rid of the voice recognition machine -- subtitles would not have worked, anyway -- and now the phone system asks callers to punch in numbers.
Jobs for Joe: You
can't call there from here
By
Auditi Guha / Journal
Staff
Thursday, November 20, 2003
City's automated
phone system giving callers the runaround
"Welcome to the City of Somerville. Please state the name of the person or department you wish to reach...": "Bill Doncaster.": "Did you say 'Dog Catcher?' ": "NO!": "Sorry. Please say the name of the person......"
This is one of the many blunders of the city of Somerville's automated voice recognition system.
"You get so frustrated you say G.D. - goddamn it - and it says, 'Goddamnit doesn't work here'," said Ward 3 Alderman Thomas Taylor, who tries to reach his Somerville-teacher wife through the system.
Other aldermen are also getting angry. Aldermen at Large Bill White and Denise Provost are fed up, passing an order last week demanding someone come and address the performance of the voice recognition system.
"We have received constituent complaints about the inability of the system to accurately service calls," said Bill White, alderman at large, who has received several complaints himself.
But the man in charge of the system says things aren't that bad. "I have been asked to appear before the BOA next week but have not been given any specific complaint information," said Patrick J. McCormick, chief information officer. "Rita Ranucci": "Did you say 'Anita Lipman?' ": "No...Rita Ranucci.": "Did you say 'Retirement?' "
McCormick is not aware of such widespread dissatisfaction regarding the phone system implemented this summer "for high performance and low cost over more cumbersome solutions such as direct inward dialing and tedious multi-layer menu systems." In fact, he added, they have received "much praise from staff and citizens who like the new system."
Greg Nadeau, Thorndike Street resident, is one. "It seems like it saves money so there's more for classroom teachers and police departments," said Nadeau, a frequent advocate for school services. "It's interesting as it keeps Somerville on the cutting edge of E-government." The VoiceRequest system from ScanSoft was recently installed and configured by Ronco Communications, a state contract vendor. It offers many savings to the taxpayer, although the technology was chosen primarily to improve the delivery of city services, not to simply save money, stressed McCormick.
After a one-time cost of $25,000, savings amount to $170,000 per year in phone-operator salaries. It also offers "improved efficiencies in communications and access between staff, vendors, and citizens," and the elimination of costs associated with publishing and maintaining city telephone directories, McCormick added.
"Mayor.": "Did you say 'voicemail?' ": "No.": "Sorry. I'm not sure what you said. Please say yes or no."
Before the city had this system, during business hours it was not possible for a staff person from outside city offices to check his own voice mail and/or reach a co-worker without talking to a live operator, explained McCormick. Callers who did not know the extension they were calling could not leave a message after hours. "All the above meant that much of the call volume required live operators to function only as a human switchboard," said McCormick. "One important goal of the new system has been to free up our live operators to spend more time with callers that have questions, concerns or comments about city government and city services." It also links departments that were not connected before. Referring to a recent complaint about reaching animal control that he said was fixed within the half-hour, McCormick said, "Animal control is not part of the [Somerville Police Department], so resolving this complaint showed just how flexible the new voice system is in adapting to citizen-centric requests for better service." McCormick said he thinks this complaint could be the reason for the aldermen's request. But the Journal has experienced other problems as well. If you're leaving a message at 2 a.m. hoping your call will be returned first thing in the morning, dream on. Many of the city employees don't have or disable their answering machines after hours, as Journal staff have found. There are also times when the system starts offering you options before you say anything or gets stuck repeating "Did you say...did you say...did you say..." and transfers you randomly to a person or department you weren't looking for in the first place. Few at City Hall have direct lines, such as the mayor's emergency phone, which is hard-wired into her office. Almost all have extensions you can only reach by dialing the main number at 617-625-6600. Otherwise you have to say the name of the person you are calling, which is usually not the most reliable way, or hit zero for an operator for assistance during work hours. "I know that there are a lot of problems [with the automated phone system]," said Vithal Deshpande, the environmental officer who seems to be the most difficult person to reach via the automated voice recognition system. "One of the possibilities is that people who leave me messages know my extension number," he added. Deshpande is one of few who leaves his answering machine on all the time, even on weekends. He acknowledged that most of the messages he gets are from people he works with - like those at public safety.
Alderman White said most of the complaints he received were about trying to contact the police department, as the Journal has also experienced.
ScanSoft Q3 financials are a shell game: The ScanSoft presentation of their Q3 financials appeared to be inconsistent with the numbers. Massive contradictions. Despite all of the babbling about how great things were going and the growth that they were experiencing, reality is that the total of all of the speech businesses from 2002 to 2003 was dead flat. The little detail that they provided didn’t not even add up arithmetically in their 10Qs. They stated that Network Solutions and embedded showed significant grow and desktop dictation was down slightly. The desktop dictation numbers that were documented in their SEC filings would lead to the conclusion that the "slight decline" in this area was in the 30% range. Did a good job of conning the financial analysts since the stock price held up.
ScanSoft Persona Goes to Europe: Not content to limit the push of the persona/branding to North America, ScanSoft is now planning a webcast for the European market. I have confidence that the Europeans are smarter and more pragmatic than the Americans and won’t be taken in by this nonsense. Persona fixation indicates immaturity of the industry: The persona fixation of the leading speech vendors appears to be driven by mostly by linguistic gurus and amateurish PR people. They are providing something that most callers really don’t want at the expense of not providing capabilities that are essential to a caller.
Entertainment Industry Knows How to Select Voices: For decades, the broadcast TV industry has been using a very simple mechanism to select the news anchor. It is called the Q score. Virtually every local news program looks alike. Based on extensive research, it has been found that the basic format works equally well from Bangor, Maine to San Diego. Since the way in which you present news, weather and sports is essentially a commodity, what matters most is the vehicle that delivers is - the anchor person. Determining the Q Score is brutally uncomplicated. It puts an array of anchormen or anchorwomen in front of a test audience and asks for just one of two responses: I like or I don’t like.
The one with the highest Q Score is selected for the anchor job (assuming that they can read large type). An interesting fact: High Q Scores share a common characteristic - they don’t sound fake. Pretty simple stuff and it makes sense. What do the leading speech vendors do to select a voice? They make it into an expensive zoo! Q Scores could also be applied to text-to-speech quality evaluations. The problem with the existing industry MOS tests is that they are way to complex. Expensive to administer and getting legitimate test subjects (you usually get professional test takers) is problematical.
Table F1
Q3, 2003 Financial Results
Supplier |
Item |
Q3, 2003 |
Q3, 2002 |
Q2, 2003 |
||
$M |
2002 to 2003 % change |
Q2, 2003 to Q3, 2003 % change |
$M |
$M |
||
| Andrea Electronics | Total Revenue | 1.17 |
14.0 |
(6.2) |
1.02 |
1.24 |
| Net Income | (1.19) |
66.3 |
(205.4) |
(3.52) |
1.13 |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 2.35 |
(47.1) |
(29.7) |
4.45 |
3.35 |
|
| Artisoft | Total Revenue | 1.97 |
36.4 |
6.2 |
1.44 |
1.85 |
| Net Income | (0.99) |
59.0 |
(43.4) |
(2.42) |
(1.75) |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 5.42 |
(19.8) |
78.1 |
6.75 |
3.04 |
|
| Bogen | Total Revenue | 14.62 |
(6.6) |
1.9 |
15.65 |
14.34 |
| Net Income | 0.31 |
(54.0) |
(47.9) |
0.67 |
0.59 |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 4.72 |
116.2 |
41.4 |
2.18 |
3.34 |
|
| Cognitronics | Total Revenue | 3.50 |
47.1 |
42.9 |
2.38 |
2.45 |
| Net Income | (0.45) |
77.3 |
(38.3) |
(1.99) |
(0.33) |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 8.87 |
(28.1) |
6.2 |
12.34 |
8.35 |
|
| Covalent Group | Total Revenue | 3.90 |
(46.6) |
(41.0) |
7.30 |
6.61 |
| Net Income | (0.39) |
(203.2) |
(596.3) |
0.38 |
0.08 |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 2.08 |
30.2 |
(52.0) |
1.60 |
4.34 |
|
| Fonix | Total Revenue | 0.46 |
(45.2) |
(27.7) |
0.83 |
0.63 |
| Net Income | (2.82) |
54.2 |
22.0 |
(6.16) |
(3.61) |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 0.00 |
(71.2) |
(96.0) |
0.00 |
0.02 |
|
| Intervoice | Total Revenue | 41.61 |
16.8 |
8.3 |
35.61 |
38.40 |
| Net Income | 3.60 |
- |
284.2 |
(16.27) |
0.94 |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 37.01 |
84.1 |
33.1 |
20.10 |
27.80 |
|
| IVoice | Total Revenue | 0.13 |
(9.9) |
69.7 |
0.14 |
0.07 |
| Net Income | (0.55) |
(81.1) |
(114.1) |
(0.30) |
(0.26) |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 1.47 |
389.7 |
143.6 |
0.30 |
0.60 |
|
| Preferred Voice | Total Revenue | 0.45 |
(26.9) |
(13.8) |
0.61 |
0.52 |
| Net Income | (0.15) |
(27.2) |
(38.4) |
(0.20) |
(0.24) |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 0.02 |
(88.7) |
(88.5) |
0.21 |
0.21 |
|
| ScanSoft | Total Revenue | 32.95 |
16.7 |
19.0 |
28.24 |
27.70 |
| Net Income | (3.73) |
(232.1) |
(43.5) |
2.83 |
(2.60) |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 48.04 |
234.1 |
182.6 |
14.38 |
17.00 |
|
| T-Netix | Total Revenue | 27.90 |
(12.0) |
(10.3) |
31.70 |
31.10 |
| Net Income | 6.50 |
983.3 |
1,757.1 |
0.60 |
0.35 |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 20.80 |
4,325.5 |
121.3 |
0.47 |
9.40 |
|
| VoxWare | Total Revenue | 2.2630 |
44.0 |
(6.7) |
1.5720 |
2.4250 |
| Net Income | (1.49) |
108.4 |
67.8 |
(0.72) |
(4.63) |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 1.7490 |
2,434.8 |
(58.8) |
0.0690 |
4.2470 |
|
| Z Tel | Total Revenue | 81.5000 |
38.8 |
16.6 |
58.7000 |
69.8750 |
| Net Income | (2.60) |
48.0 |
56.7 |
(5.00) |
(6.01) |
|
| Cash or equiv. | 14.5440 |
8.0 |
2.4 |
13.4640 |
14.2000 |
|
Table F2
Speech Industry Financial Summary – December 1, 2003 |
|||||||||||
Company |
Symbol |
Shares |
2002 |
Market Cap. |
Mkt Cap./Rev. |
2001 |
|||||
Last |
52-wk. |
Rev. |
Net Income |
11/1/03 |
% change |
Rev. |
|||||
Hi |
Low |
$M |
$M |
$M |
|||||||
| Andrea Electronics | AND |
0.50 |
0.90 |
0.18 |
7.2 |
(21.1) |
13.30 M |
6.91 |
1.85 |
9.9 |
|
| Apropos Technologies | APRS |
3.97 |
4.19 |
1.12 |
20.9 |
(15.0) |
67.09M |
25.36 |
3.21 |
22.4 |
|
| Artisoft | ASFTC |
- |
4.73 |
1.36 |
4.5 |
(10.7) |
9.58M |
0.00 |
2.13 |
7.2 |
|
| Aspect Communications | ASPT |
14.97 |
15.34 |
2.09 |
396.1 |
(108.3) |
839.83M |
13.76 |
2.12 |
449.4 |
|
| Bogen Communications | BOGN |
4.91 |
5.50 |
3.30 |
59.1 |
2.0 |
25.60M |
18.35 |
0.43 |
57.1 |
|
| Brooktrout Technology | BRKT |
15.05 |
15.95 |
4.61 |
73.5 |
(5.0) |
187.38M |
5.73 |
2.55 |
79.8 |
|
| Captaris | CAPA |
6.09 |
7.50 |
2.16 |
94.6 |
(7.4) |
195.82M |
7.81 |
2.07 |
92.1 |
|
| Cognitronics | CGN |
3.32 |
3.30 |
1.30 |
11.3 |
(6.4) |
18.49M |
26.82 |
1.64 |
18.9 |
|
| Comverse Technology | CMVT |
18.90 |
19.56 |
8.50 |
735.9 |
(115.3) |
3.61B |
4.94 |
4.91 |
1,270.2 |
|
| Convergys | CVG |
15.55 |
20.80 |
11.30 |
2,286.2 |
145.9 |
2.22B |
(3.06) |
0.97 |
2,320.6 |
|
| Covalent Group | CVGR |
2.21 |
3.05 |
1.75 |
29.2 |
2.5 |
28.88M |
(9.07) |
0.99 |
19.9 |
|
| Eckoh | ECK |
17.75 |
17.70 |
6.00 |
85.4 |
(24.7) |
49.5 |
(4.03) |
0.58 |
69.6 |
|
| Enghouse | ESL |
16.00 |
16.45 |
9.75 |
9.8 |
3.9 |
142.0 |
14.30 |
14.55 |
13.1 |
|
| Fonix | FINX |
0.670 |
5.24 |
0.08 |
3.1 |
(19.9) |
16.65M |
(24.69) |
5.37 |
0.6 |
|
| Glenayre | GEMS |
3.08 |
3.48 |
0.76 |
67.4 |
(7.8) |
203.41M |
1.42 |
3.02 |
97.5 |
|
| Interactive Intelligence | ININ |
6.60 |
5.92 |
2.50 |
47.8 |
(7.7) |
103.6 |
100.63 |
2.17 |
47.9 |
|
| InterVoice | INTV |
10.54 |
11.12 |
1.50 |
145.6 |
(96.1) |
361.80M |
(0.74) |
2.48 |
246.2 |
|
| iVoice | IVOC |
0.0042 |
0.40 |
0.0002 |
0.6 |
(2.1) |
- |
- |
- |
0.4 |
|
| MedQuist | MEDQ |
15.16 |
21.00 |
14.50 |
486.2 |
43.9 |
564.16M |
(9.05) |
1.16 |
405.4 |
|
| Microlog | MLOG |
0.26 |
0.90 |
0.060 |
5.6 |
0.0 |
1.85M |
(39.54) |
0.33 |
6.1 |
|
| NMS Communications | NMSS |
5.45 |
5.95 |
0.70 |
76.5 |
(6.1) |
197.41M |
34.29 |
2.58 |
79.5 |
|
| Nuance Communications | NUAN |
8.96 |
8.98 |
2.08 |
44.1 |
(71.2) |
357.49M |
42.97 |
8.11 |
39.2 |
|
| Preferred Voice | PFVI |
0.070 |
0.25 |
0.05 |
2.2 |
(1.9) |
1.29M |
(6.52) |
0.59 |
1.5 |
|
| ScanSoft | SSFT |
5.79 |
7.75 |
3.32 |
106.1 |
6.3 |
383.69M |
(0.17) |
3.62 |
62.7 |
|
| TALX | TALX |
26.12 |
31.75 |
9.18 |
137.8 |
12.7 |
354.32M |
21.18 |
2.57 |
45.5 |
|
| T-Netix | TNTX |
3.81 |
4.72 |
1.11 |
119.8 |
2.5 |
57.35M |
0.26 |
0.48 |
117.0 |
|
| VoxWare | VOXW |
0.14 |
0.22 |
0.020 |
4.6 |
(6.6) |
3.95M |
7.63 |
0.86 |
1.5 |
|
| Verint | VRNT |
23.77 |
27.45 |
13.69 |
131.2 |
(4.6) |
709.2 |
5.74 |
5.41 |
141.3 |
|
| West Teleservices | WSTC |
24.27 |
28.55 |
13.17 |
820.2 |
69.6 |
1.63B |
0.00 |
1.99 |
780.2 |
|
| Wizzard Software | WIZD |
0.85 |
1.03 |
0.32 |
0.346 |
(1.4) |
17.89 |
73.35 |
51.71 |
0.088 |
|
| Z-Tel | ZTEL |
2.46 |
3.25 |
0.60 |
235.3 |
(19.6) |
87.0 |
35.16 |
0.37 |
275.9 |
|
| Total | Total |
6,248.1 |
(269.5) |
12,250.1 |
4.50 |
1.96 |
6,778.7 |
||||