Vlingo aids Yahoo's speech recognition venture

Internet search giant Yahoo Inc.'s move into mobile search will be powered in part by speech recognition start-up vlingo Corp., a collaboration that highlights the industry's interest in using talking, rather than triple-tapping, to navigate content on cellphones. Vlingo also said yesterday that Yahoo led a $20 million investment in the company. The oneSearch technology is available now to some BlackBerry users, and will be expanded in coming months. [click heading for more]

VoiceXML Forum Certifies Verizon Business' Hosted Interactive Voice Response Platform

Verizon Business' Hosted Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform has been certified by the VoiceXML Forum as compliant with the VoiceXML 2.0 standard and the latest release of the forum's VoiceXML 2.0 test suite. The forum is a global industry organization chartered to promote and accelerate the worldwide adoption of VoiceXML-based applications. [click heading for more]

Loquendo Receives 2008 Frost & Sullivan European Telematics and Infotainment Emerging Company of the Year Award

The 2008 Frost & Sullivan European Telematics and Infotainment Emerging Company of the Year Award is presented to Loquendo. From being a key supplier of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text to speech (TTS) solutions to the telephony market, Loquendo has emerged as a major participant in the car navigation and portable navigation devices (PND) market in Europe[click heading for more]

Speech recognition finds favour - User feedback more positive than just two years ago

Speech recognition was the most preferred self-service channel among customers of the technology, according to a survey conducted in Australia for Nuance Communications by research company, callcentres.net. [click heading for more]

Cognitive Code: Speech recognition AI goes mobile

What it does: An artificial intelligence platform for conversational speech recognition. While it's not a Web service, it can be applied to networked technologies, and has a lot of potential in the mobile world. [click heading for more]

OnMobile completes the largest global deployment of Nuance Speech Solutions

Nuance Communications, Inc, today announced that OnMobile has completed the largest global deployment of Nuance speech solutions for telecom value-added services (VAS). OnMobile provides services to leading Indian telecom operators, including Airtel, Reliance Communications, Vodafone, Idea, BSNL and Tata Indicom.
OnMobile offers a multi-purpose VAS platform featuring a voice portal, ringback tones, M-commerce and mobile marketing. Powered by Nuance Voice Search, OnMobile’s portals deliver voice-enabled data and search calls to more than 280 million subscribers in India and more than 350 million users globally.
By partnering with Nuance to develop a complete and comprehensive language model for the Indian market, OnMobile now deploys services that support 15 major Indian languages - English, Hindi, Kannada, Telegu, Tamil, Malayalam ,Marathi, Gujarathi, Rajashthani, Punjabi, Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, Bengali, Assamese and Oriya. [click heading for more]

Norwegian hospital to roll out voice-based information capture

Royal Philips Electronics announced today that Ulleval University Hospital in Oslo - Norway's largest clinical centre - will roll out SpeechMagic to more than 1,000 physicians across all medical specialties.Upon completion at the beginning of 2009, the implementation is expected to be the world's largest deployment of front-end speech recognition at one single hospital site. The hospital expects to increase the quality of medical reports, speed up documentation workflows and reduce administrative costs. [click heading for more]

Philips SpeechMagic to be implemented in one of the world’s largest hospital-wide speech recognition projects

Royal Philips Electronics (AEX: PHI, NYSE: PHG) announced today that Ulleval University Hospital in Oslo, Norway’s largest clinical center, will roll out the company’s SpeechMagic to more than 1,000 physicians across all medical specialties. When completed at the beginning of 2009, the implementation is expected to be the world’s largest deployment of front-end speech recognition at one single hospital site. The hospital expects to increase the quality of medical reports, speed up documentation workflows and reduce administrative costs which can result in improved patient care.[click heading for more]

Speak2Me Successfully Completes Tests of Its Online Service

Speak2Me Inc. has successfully completed beta tests of its online service for conversational English at three Beijing universities.
These beta tests, with students at Capital Normal University, Beijing Union University and the National Geology University, bring Speak2Me one step closer to a full scale China-wide rollout of the commercial version of its online service for English language learners. [click heading for more]

Avatar Mimics You in Real Time

[nik's note: A little bit of a digression from 'pure speech' but a very interesting concept, and possibly a disruptive one. We may well see this technology appear in contact centres one day, so worthy of note here.]

It’s a little bit like looking in the mirror at your cartoon double, except that the “reflection” is an avatar on your computer screen. Wave your hand, nod your head, speak a sentence, and your avatar does the same. The technology is already on display at the headquarters of Deutsche Telekom in Bonn, Germany, and at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin. Visitors can experiment with making gestures and watching comical characters mimic them in real time. [click heading for more]