Big news in the speech space. I like the ability to have so many different languages supported: Argentinean, Brazilian, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Chilean, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Mexican, Portuguese, Swedish, U.K. and U.S. English.

There is lots of interesting activity over at ScanSoft, one of the leaders in the speech technology markets. They have a number of recent wins in the video game and automotive market and soon they will be embarking on providing customers with reusable chunks of code, each known as a SpeechPak. The goal is to get companies in vertical markets up and running quickly and some of the first companies to receive threes custom pieces of code will be healthcare, travel and the utilities market.

Big news in speech and standards. Loquendo is working with the W3C or the Worldwide Web Consortium to bring a higher level of standardization to speech technology.

Loquendo TTS Powers W3C Standardization Activities

Loquendo, the global speech technology company, today announced that as part of ongoing commitment to W3C standardization activities, it has donated its world-class speech technologies, including the Loquendo TTS text-to-speech engine, Loquendo ASR automatic speech recognition and the VoxNauta(tm) speech platform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for creating speech-enabled demos, especially in the Multimodal Interaction field.

The W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity seeks to extend the Web to allow users to dynamically select the most appropriate mode of interaction for their current needs, whilst enabling developers to provide an effective user interface for whichever modes the user selects. Depending on the device, users will be able to provide input via speech, handwriting, and keystrokes, with output presented through displays, pre-recorded and synthetic speech, audio, and tactile mechanisms.

The first Multimodal Interaction Group demo powered by Loquendo Technology will be presented today during the W3C Technical Plenary in Boston.

I have been hearing more and more rumblings in the VoIP industry regarding Jerry Weinberger of Rates Technology Inc. (RTI). I don't get too many people coming to me about patent issues so when I heard about this company, I decided to delve into this potential story a bit more. What intrigued me is that apparently RTI has no products... They exist to collect revenue from other companies.

I did some research and found that Rates Technologies has sued Nortel, Sharp Electronics and others.

According to the Gold Systems Webinar I am on now, AAA on Minnesota has increased customer satisfaction using speech technology from Gold Systems. They have reduced agent turnover as a result of using speech and the agents are now not as threatened as they once were. The agents are happy that the mundane calls are being handled by automation. Agents get to deal with calls that have to do with personal service.