TeleWare has had an agreement with Scansoft (for ASR) and Rhetorical (for TTS) for a number of years and the current agreements are moving TeleWare to the use of the latest technology available (both Scansoft and Rhetorical are now part of Nuance).
TeleWare has supported speech recognition for over 3 years using technology from Scansoft (now Nuance) to provide voice activated directory access linked to its call routing capability for IP and traditional telephony applications, with support for a wide range of different languages. In addition to the TeleSpeak voice activated directory, TeleWare applications using TTS and ASR technologies include the IVR applications and email-to-speech capabilities allowing mobile users to collect and respond to their emails over the mobile phone as voice messages.
“Text-to-Speech and speech recognition provide good quality solutions and highly visible returns on investment for businesses,” explains Peter Orr, Sales Director of the TeleWare Group. “Incorporating these capabilities into our product set allows our customers to build on their existing investment, taking advantage of these now mature technologies as part of their voice strategy,” added Orr.
TeleSpeak is a scalable system capable of dealing with over 250,000 directory entries, using 'state-of-the-art' speaker independent speech recognition technology combined with highly tuned language resources specific to the task of call routing. It provides highly accurate recognition and retrieval from large vocabularies, including name, department, topic and location information. Other typical applications include booking systems, company information and voice controlled menus.
ASR and TTS capabilities provided within intelligent Application Builder include the use of Voice Forms for data collection; the ability to automatically generate both static and dynamic voice prompts to callers and voice control through menu options and data input, which means that requirements may be spoken by callers rather than having the dialogue entered through the key pad.
“Text-to-Speech capabilities within the IVR product can provide a more cost effective and viable option than pre-recording prompts where frequent changes are required,” said Orr. “Text-to-Speech can also be used to read back information to callers from a database. This allows the system to be closely tailored to existing business processes and reduces staff involvement in routine calls,” he concluded.