Case study: BT uses open source BI to support its voicemail system

BT has deployed open source software to support its voicemail system, which currently serves around eight million UK customers.

With the help of systems integrator Unisys, the telco deployed Jaspersoft ’s open source business intelligence (BI) software in its statistical data warehouse (SDW) around 18 months ago, following an initial six-month development project around the source code.

About 50 employees currently use Jaspersoft to query and report on data stored in BT’s vast voicemail database. Staff can analyse mailbox and message counts by class of service, service provider, and usage level and frequency, for example, and produce and distribute reports quickly and easily in multiple formats, which include PDF, Excel, Word and CSV.

This has helped the telco reduce the time it previously took to research and respond to its voice mail customer queries, and to lower the cost of producing ad hoc reports that were previously available only either in standard, daily formats or obtained by submitting a special request to Unisys.

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A speech recognizer written entirely in the JavaTM programming language

[nik's note: interesting to see the actitivy in the open source area as well as the gradual migration of speech technology to hand-held devices. How long left for speech in the network? ]

Sphinx-4 is a state-of-the-art speech recognition system written entirely in the JavaTM programming language. It was created via a joint collaboration between the Sphinx group at Carnegie Mellon University, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), and Hewlett Packard (HP), with contributions from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Sphinx-4 started out as a port of Sphinx-3 to the Java programming language, but evolved into a recognizer designed to be much more flexible than Sphinx-3, thus becoming an excellent platform for speech research. [click heading for more]