Partnership announcements were plentiful at the ninth annual SpeechTEK International Educational Conference and Exposition, which took place last week in New York City. The unions demonstrate a trend among vendors in the speech recognition technology field to offer end-to-end, quick-to-deploy, voice-application solutions to customers.
Following are some of the newly formed alliances announced at SpeechTEK:
c SandCherry Inc. announced it has entered several relationships to address the increased demand for advanced speech services. Through partnerships with Apptera, Fortegra, Speechvantage, Voxpilot, Voice Objects and 8Hertz, SandCherry plans to develop pre-packaged and customized application solutions to allow carriers and enterprises to deploy speech-enabled services.
SandCherry also announced Unisys Corp. will deploy speech applications that use SandCherry’s AppDev VXML and SoftServer platform with Unisys speech application development tools and integration capabilities. The joint solution will enable service providers and enterprises to develop applications for customer service, work force management, voice portals and speech-enabled network services. Availability of the AppDev VXML development tool, which was designed for BEA’s Web Logic Workshop 8.1, was also announced last week. The product has a list price of $495 per user.
c Kirusa and Hewlett Packard Inc. announced they will partner to create multimodal solutions on the HP OpenCall Media Platform and HP servers. The companies also plan to demonstrate a jointly developed multimodal railway journey application at the ITU World Telecom show in Geneva from Oct. 12-18.
c ACCESS and IBM announced they have joined forces to integrate ACCESS’ NetFront v3.1 browser with IBM’s embedded ViaVoice speech-recognition program, resulting in a mobile XHTML+VoiceXML (X+V) solution. With the joint solution, developers can create user-centric multimodal applications for wireless devices. ACCESS also announced it has joined the VoiceXML Forum, which promotes the development of VoiceXML technologies.
c VoiceGenie Technologies Inc. and Loquendo announced an alliance through which the companies will integrate Loquendo’s speech-recognition technology with VoiceGenie’s VoiceXML speech platform.
“Our complementary technologies enable organizations to deploy superior voice solutions that support personalized customer care applications, dramatically improving productivity as well as responsiveness to the customer while at the same time reducing costs for the enterprise,” said Eric Jackson, vice president of strategy and business development at VoiceGenie.
c V-Enable and Phonetic formed an alliance for a global joint sales, marketing and support relationship for multimodal solutions that will allow the companies to market joint solutions. The companies plan to integrate Phonetic Systems’ Voice Search Engine (VSE) with V-Enable’s veANYWAY multimodal solution to enable applications that combine data services with speech commands. “Multimodality represents a key enabling technology in the development of the wireless Internet,” said John McCready, vice president of marketing at Phonetic.
c Babel Technologies S.A. announced its embedded text-to-speech (TTS) solution, PocketBabil, will be deployed in Owasys’ owasys22C wireless phone for the blind and visually impaired. PocketBabil will allow owasys22C to talk to end users by announcing who is calling and reading messages aloud. The solution will feature English and Spanish languages.
c In other TTS news, Fonix Corp. released version 5.0 of its Fonix DECtalk TTS technology for developing embedded voice applications for wireless devices and automobiles. The product supports several hardware platforms and operating systems and offers nine voices and six languages.
