Vlingo Named One of Ten FiReStarters by Future in Review

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Vlingo Corporation (www.vlingo.com) today announced that it has been selected as one of 10 FiReStarters at the upcoming Future in Review 2008 Conference. Vlingo was selected by strategic investment members of the Strategic News Service(R) who sought out the ten emerging technology companies that they believe will "change the world in a positive way."

Vlingo was selected because of its ground-breaking approach to speech recognition for the mobile market. Launched as part of Yahoo! OneSearch(TM) earlier this month, vlingo is the first and only open and unconstrained speech recognition technology for the mobile industry. Vlingo products allow consumers to simply speak into any mobile application and have their speech converted into text on the mobile device. They can launch applications and complete text fields such as Web search or messaging by simply speaking into their phones. Vlingo makes this easy because users do not have to memorize a limited set of commands or structure input in particular ways. The vlingo technology is based on core speech recognition technology from IBM, which supports vlingo's goals of creating and scaling across large numbers of users and applications. [click heading for more]

East Midlands Procurement Hub Selects SRC for Digital Dictation and Speech Recognition

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SRC awarded preferred supplier status for the provision of Digital Dictation and Speech Recognition solutions across the East Midlands Strategic Health Authority. Award enables all NHS Trusts across Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire County & Rutland and Northamptonshire to contract with SRC for the provision of cost effective Digital Dictation and Speech Recognition solutions without the need to carry out their own time consuming and costly tendering process. [click heading for more]

Speech Within Your Reach

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If you manage a contact center, chances are good you have experience in offering some sort of self service to customers: an IVR, or a Web site with an FAQ list, perhaps. You know why self-service is good: It automates the basic issues customers have that may take up a large portion of your expensive live agents’ time, like balance inquiries and transfers for a bank, outage and billing information for a utility, store hours and stock availabilities for a retail store, price checks in the case of a b-to-b situation.

Enter speech-enabled customer self service. There is some evidence that customers actually like using speech for navigation and self service. There are no buttons to push, most systems allow “barge in” (so customers don’t have to wait for the end of a prompt), and speech systems are “smarter” and can allow for more ambiguous input, in the case of more advanced speech recognition.[click heading for more]

Pioneer releases LINC with speech recognition

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Pioneer's Mobile Entertainment Division (Long Beach, Ca.) is releasing the promised AVIC-F500BT LINC (Lifestyle Innovation Network Console), a portable navigation and speech recognition unit.

The device incorporates Pioneer's "VoiceBox Conversational Voice Search Platform," a nicely developed speech recognition system that enables iPod or other MP3 players and voice control for you Bluetooth-connected phone. VoiceBox's innovation is it's extraction algorihm that allow what Pioneer terms "conversational commands" and "intent recognition", and very advanced noise-canceling that deals quite well with ambient vehicle noise and the presence of extra voices.

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Who should buy speech analytics technology?

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Speech analytics technology has evolved in recent years, providing organizations with insight into sales, service and products pulled not just from call center reports but truly from the voice of the customer.

Who should really own speech analytics? Does it belong under the management of the contact center? Marketing? Analytics/business intelligence (BI)? It's a question organizations need to consider when they're purchasing speech analytics tools, according to Keith Dawson, senior analyst with Frost and Sullivan.

Essentially, there are four ways for an organization to purchase speech analytics, according to Dawson.[click heading for more]

Nuance Communications to Buy EScription

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Speech recognition software maker Nuance Communications Inc. said Tuesday it will buy privately held medical transcription company eScription for $363 million.
The purchase cost includes $340 million in cash and $23 million in Nuance stock. Nuance will also assume $37 million in eScription employee stock options. It expects the deal to close in the 2008 third quarter.

Nuance says it hopes to streamline clinical documentation with the acquisition and said it expects to save the health care industry more than $1 billion by 2011.[click heading for more]

Envox displaces Periphonics at Sinclair Oil

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Envox Worldwide today announced that it has been selected by Sinclair Oil Corporation, an independent oil company with distribution throughout the plains and mountain states, to provide interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities for the company's customer service operations. Sinclair chose a next-generation Envox voice solution to replace its proprietary Periphonics system and enable them to leverage new technologies to offer customers better service today, and in the future. [click heading for more]

Nuance Mobile Launches Voicemail to Text; New Service Converts Voicemail to Readable Messages

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Nuance Communications, Inc. has announced Nuance Voicemail to Text, a voicemail transcription service that delivers high-quality readable messages to mobile devices. Offered through carriers, the service uses Nuance's speech recognition and transcription workflow solutions to convert voicemails left on any voicemail box into text. Transcribed messages are sent to users as SMS or email messages. [click heading for more]