Time for some important CRM news. Talisma, a provider of multi-channel CRM solutions, today announced the acquisition of KnowledgeBase.net, a market-leading provider of hosted and on-site Knowledge Management (KM) software for Customer Support and Self-service. Talisma will incorporate KnowledgeBase.net's technology, intellectual property, and customer base into its operations, fueling its strategy of organic and acquisition-based growth. The acquisition is the culmination of over eighteen months of technology, product, and business collaboration between the two companies and has already resulted in several product and service offerings.

I just received this story pitch for Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine discussing how their technology has an "emotion detection" capability, so if an agent raises his voice or swears at a customer, a call center supervisor can be notified.

Scary concept considering how monitored the agents already are. I would NOT want to be a call center agent, I'll tell you that. If you have the ability to make personal calls, you'd better not start any arguments with your spouse or else have your conversation flagged for playback by the supervisor. It was an intriguing concept that I thought was worth sharing.

Here was the pitch:
Ever wonder what the person on the other end of the line is doing?

I've always been fascinated with word spotting analysis. -- You know, the ability for the NSA to overhear you say, "Let's kill the president" on the telephone and then mysteriously three hours later the Secret Service shows up at your door. Not that that has ever happened to me. : )

Ok, maybe that scenario is a bit mythical, but the NSA & CIA do have some interesting technology to eavesdrop on conversations and perform wordspotting.

In keeping with my last blog post about Parus' speech-recognition IVR, I just got this release a few minutes ago I thought I'd share. Similar to Parus Interactive, VoiceGenie also supports SIP and the VoXML standards.

Toronto, Canada – January 17, 2005. VoiceGenie Technologies Inc., the proven performance leader in standards-based software platforms powering customer contact solutions and next-generation networks, today announced record sales results for the company’s fiscal year, ending December 31, 2004.