Eckoh FY pretax loss widens; offer talks on, no bids on table currently

Eckoh Plc. posted a wider full-year pretax loss as revenues fell versus last year but said, following the completion of its restructuring programme, it has a strong balance sheet and is now well positioned to capitalise on medium to long term trends.
For the year ended March 31, 2008, the group reported a pretax loss of 2.2 million pounds versus a restated 615,000 pounds last year as revenues plunged to
25.6 million from a restated 77.6 million a year ago.
The company said negative stories on the use of premium rate telephony in broadcasting resulted in a huge reduction in the number of calls into its premium rate services and consequential reduction in its revenues. On July 6, 2007, Eckoh had said premium rate services regulator ICSTIS had fined it a record 150,000 pounds over the conduct of the Richard and Judy Show's 'You Say We Pay' competition.
loadAd('mpu');
In its statement Monday, the UK's largest provider of hosted speech recognition services added that offer discussions have continued with various parties but none of the discussions at this stage contemplate an offer being made for the entire issued share capital of the company. [click heading for more]

BT and Eckoh win a three year contract with the Ministry of Justice

[nik's note: I can't help but feel a certain satisfaction with this announcement - in a sense this was orginally my 'baby' when I was at BT - where I proposed and specified the first Magistrates Eckoh/BT fine payment voice self-service solution. Glad to see it has come of age.. :-) ]

BT and Eckoh’s hosted solution to provide an automated fine payment service for all Magistrates’ Courts across England and Wales
BT and Eckoh, the UK’s largest provider of hosted speech recognition services, today announced that they have been awarded a new three year, multi-million pound contract with the Ministry of Justice, to provide an automated fine payment service for Magistrates’ Courts (“Courts”) across England and Wales. BT and Eckoh will also supply the live contact centre operation to support the automated service, providing the Courts with a complete end-to-end telephony solution. [click heading for more]

George Bush's voice speech synthesised for Text-to-speech

Ok folks, this is just for fun, but on my web travels I discovered this speech synthesis of George Bush using the Cereproc TTS engine. Quality is what you would expect from a voice built from a mixed-bag of public domain speech samples, but actually, it's rather convincing.

For a long time we've never been able to believe photographs thanks to the awesome power of Adobe Photoshop. Perhaps the time when the same is true of voice recordings is soon upon us... [click heading for more]

Biometric security to drive $7.3 billion in five years

A new study by ABI Research concludes that biometric-security applications will account for $7.3 billion of spending in 2013, up from about $3 billion this year. Fingerprint recognition will continue to be the dominant form of biometric identification, but face-, iris-, hand-, and speech-recognition will also play roles. Importantly, the biometric vendor community will benefit as facility operators realize the value of combining multiple types for increased security. [click heading for more]

Six Technologies That May or May Not Kill The Mouse in Five Years

Voice Commands: Joined with artificial intelligence, voice-commands might take out the mouse with easy management of several different tasks at once. Speech recognition is already becoming a common technology. But it's not completely accurate yet (see the problems found in speech recognition programs for Windows Vista). This likely won't be ready in five years. [click heading for more]

Reigate and Banstead Borough Council to use speech self service payments

Not previously known for being on the cutting edge of Silicone valley, Reigate and Banstead Borough Council has decided to opt for a 21st century solution for its automated payment transactions.
The council has taken on Telephonetics VIP speech self service solution which is the latest in speech recognition and voice automation payment methods to service around 50,000 homes in Reigate and Banstead with approximately 127,000 residents .
The system will be introduced gradually, at first the Council will use the speech self service technology to process payment transactions such as parking fines or council tax bills. [click heading for more]

Welsh English speech goes online

Hundreds of recordings of disappearing dialects of English spoken in Wales from the 1960s onwards are being made available for research.
Swansea University researchers taped the "folk-speech" of elderly villagers, and later urban youngsters, to compile the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects.
Archive director Rob Penhallurick said: "In some parts of Wales, English has been spoken for nearly 1,000 years."
Around 500 recordings are available via the British Library's online catalogue. [click heading for more]

Since when was "Hello" Ukranian

Here's a bizarre thing - not strictly speech related, but automated translation, so close enough for this blog :-) I wanted to know what "Hello" was in Austrian, so I figured German would be good enough... Seems Google translation has an unusual view of the English language. Check the picture below and see what you make of it yourself :-)

Towards Customer Care On Demand

Wall Street, thus far, has been less than lukewarm about Convergys’ acquisition of IVR and next-generation, contact-center specialist Intervoice on July 16th. Concern arises from the fact that the company is prepared to pay $335 million in cash when it entered the quarter with only $80 million in “cash” on its balance sheet. Indeed, even though we knew that Intervoice was “in play” with a change of management and a revamped product line, we did not count Convergys as one of the prospective buyers, partly because of its cash situation and partly because Convergys has not been tremendously active as an acquiring company of late. [click heading for more]

Philips SpeechMagic Advanced launched in Finland

Royal Philips Electronics has released its speech recognition-based report management software, Philips SpeechMagic Executive Advanced (SMEA), in Finland.
The software is to be made available to Finnish hospitals, in order to help speed up the availability of medical reports and information. [click heading for more]