Speech Technology

Industry Dashboard

The 2007 Speech Luminaries

Winners for the Speech Luminaries awards are presented. Mark Randolph, Ph.D., took over as chairman of the VoiceXML Forum in January, and since then the organization has expanded its technical, educational, and marketing efforts beyond VoiceXML into adjacent technologies, including speaker verification, call control and routing, Media Resource Control Protocol, Voice over Internet Protocol, tools, usability and accessibility. Michael Codini is the chief technical officer at San Mateo, CA-base...

The 2007 Star Performers

The top four companies for the Speech Industry Star Performers are presented. SpeechGear's Compadre suite of instant language translation software includes a series of translation solutions, each targeted to a specific user need. Until recently, software giant Microsoft had been playing catch-up when it came to speech technologies. This past year, though, the company piled a lot onto its plate. In March, it acquired Tellme Networks, expanding its presence in the speech-enabled mobile search e...

The 2007 Market Leaders

The speech technology industry has matured to a point where prominent leaders have emerged from the pack. To recognize these companies for their trailblazing efforts, the first installment of the Speech Market Leader Awards was assembled. These awards feature four vendors in five speech technology categories. Headquartered in Europe, Loquendo has a lot of experience with international markets and the multitude of languages that make up those markets. Cisco Systems emerged as the clear leader ...

The 2007 Implementation Awards

In the first installment of the Speech Industry Implementation Awards, companies that have garnered impressive results from their recent speech technology deployments are recognized. The four winners this year span three industries: financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare. Wachovia Corp, a $730 billion financial services company, was shifting to XML-based technology to share information across the enterprise. Wachovia sought new IVR technology that would handle touchtone IVR an...

The Characters You Meet in Vui Design

VUI designers sometimes hear snickers that they just do not do their jobs well. Creating a VUI design is only the beginning of their work. The real skill is getting others to accept what they have created. Here are different personas that describe the VUI designer's favorite naysayers. The Verbal Nitpicker edits dialog with a free hand, demanding word changes often without any reason other than, they think this sounds better. The Legal Eagle is the one to thank for "your call may be monitored...

Speech Solutions

Editor's Letter

A Defining Moment

Voice Value

Speech Technology with Impact

When unified messaging (UM) emerged in the early 1990s, it was touted as a productivity enhancer for the mobile worker. Suddenly, users could receive voice-mails, faxes, and emails in a single inbox. The most prevalent function in this group is voicemail transcription services, which turn voice messages into emails or SMS messages. There are, however downsides. Accuracy of the speech-to-text conversion, especially in long voicemails, can sometimes be as low as 62% to 70%. However, one well-es...

Fyi

Asr Technologies Seen As Key to Growth in Ivr Market

With about 90% saturation in the large enterprise segment, vendors in the North American interactive voice response (IVR) market are looking to small-sized and mid-sized businesses for future growth opportunities, according to a research report from Frost & Sullivan. The report explains that one factor responsible for increased activity in the small and medium market is the growing trend toward adopting open standards, such as VoiceXML. While the larger enterprise segment -- with 65 or mo...

New Patent Claims Priority in Nlp Development

Parus Interactive, a provider of speech-enabled unified communications software solutions, received a Notice of Allowance from the US Patent Office July 19 for a patent covering natural language processing technologies. This particular patent is the continuation of an earlier patent that Parus Interactive, based in Bannockburn, IL, filed for the technology back in March 1998, claiming priority to an earlier application developed in 1997. The newly allowed Parus Interactive patent overlays the...

Strong Growth Expected for Uc and Ip Contact Centers

With the growth of offshore call centers and ever-increasing modes of personal communication, unified communications has filled a niche for businesses with disparate locations, and people who rely on a combination of voice, email, and text messaging to stay up to date and in touch. In a report released by Infonetics Research in July, analysts state that the technology is closer to more widespread adoption, stating that both unified communications and the IP contact center markets are growing ...

Spinvox Passes Voice Message Milestone

SpinVox converted its 50-millionth voice message into text through its Voice Message Conversion System at the end of June. The system, launched three years ago, captures voice content, converts it to text, and posts it to any mobile phone or device specified by the user. Because of the sheer volume of activity, and confidentiality issues, SpinVox could not release details about the specific message that was transferred to text. SpinVox originally launched its voicemail-to-text conversion serv...

Motorola Buys Leapstone Systems

Cios Clamoring to Adopt Voip, but Not Without Hesitation

A recent survey of CIOs by IDG Research Services shows increasing adoption of IP telephony. The survey, sponsored by Interactive Intelligence, found that 63% of respondents intend to deploy an IP PBX within the next 12 months, an increase from the 50% who currently use such a system. The most important considerations for CIOs in selecting IP communications applications and providers were performance (74%) and security (63%), followed by integration, easy installation, scalability, technical s...

Sound Bytes

View From Avios

A New Read On Digital Talking Books

Today, digital hardware, synthetic speech software, and powerful standards for digital talking books (DTBs) have dramatically enhanced the accessibility of print-originated material. The content of many books, articles, and manuals is available as electronic text, enabling text-to-speech (TTS) software to read out the material on PCs. Today's digital books are multimedia documents; content includes electronic text and recorded files. In addition to the evolution in hardware and software for t...

Forward Thinking

Speaker Authentication: Exploding Some of the Myths

Speaker authentication (SA) is a biometric technology that ensures that people are who they claim to be. Like automatic speech recognition (ASR), it is a computerization of a universal human ability. It is much easier for a professional mimic to fool other people than an SA system. The reason is that mimics can imitate a speaker's style and may modify their voices to approximate another person's pitch patterns, but they cannot change their physiology or anatomy. Replay attacks occur when some...

Speech Analytics

Best Practices: The Value of Speech Analytics

Advanced Speech Analytics for Business Critical Activities

Ensuring Success with Speech Analytics

Speech Is Within Your Reach

Speech Analytics From Verint Witness Actionable Solutions: Actionable Intelligence for Informed Decisions