The Shifting Speech Technologies Industry

May 10, 2005

The speech technology industry is changing shape, though I'm sure that's not news to most people in the contact center industry. With yesterday's announcement of the merger of Nuance and ScanSoft, and the below announcement of cooperation between LumenVox and Nuance 8.5, we can presume that we haven't seen the last of the shifting of both the speech behemoths and the smaller speech application innovators.

Industry insight tells us that the market as a whole has been slow to adopt speech. We can presume that a lot of companies have�been scared off by what they perceive to be the tech-intense process of creating dialogs and scripts...companies foresee themselves as having to hire nine engineers just to maintain their speech applications.

What companies like LumenVox and TuVox are trying to tell the market is: You don't need to be an expert. These companies are automating the creation of speech processes in the way that call center software companies created automated, easy-to-use processes to create workflows, schedules, outbound scripts, recording rules and other tasks.

The moral of the story? Don't be afraid of speech.

TES

LumenVox's Speech Tuner Supports Nuance 8.5

San Diego, CA (May 10, 2005) – LumenVox (www.LumenVox.com), an innovator in speech recognition technology, announces the availability of Nuance 8.5 support with their Speech Tuner. The Tuner allows companies working with Nuance-based speech applications to perform various tuning and testing in-house.

LumenVox's Speech Tuner is a complete maintenance tool that allows end-users, value-added resellers, and platform providers to perform tuning, transcription, as well as parameter, grammar, and version upgrade testing of any speech-driven application created on Nuance 8.5 and LumenVox platforms.� The Tuner allows companies to tune and test each interaction on-the-fly, providing highly dynamic interactive tuning and testing sessions. Using their own call logs, companies can get a detailed view of how the ASR is responding to callers. They can make changes to grammars and engine parameters, and immediately retest against historical data to determine if any change would help, hurt, or make no difference to the application's performance in the future.

With this GUI-based tool, companies developing speech applications on various ASR platforms can bring speech application tuning in-house and avoid costly professional service fees. Keith Herold, Lead Speech Recognition Developer at LumenVox states, “The Speech Tuner's support for Nuance is in high-demand in the industry. The Speech Tuner is a crucial piece in the industry's effort to promote speech applications and improve the caller's experience, regardless of which ASR vendor is being deployed. Our next steps will be towards integrating other speech engines like ScanSoft, IBM, Loquendo, etc.”

About LumenVox

LumenVox is a speech recognition company with over a decade of telephony experience. They develop a suite of speech recognition software that includes the Speech Recognition Engine, Speech Driven Information System, Speech Tuner, and Speech Driven Assistant. With this suite of software and worldwide technology partners, they can design, develop, deploy, maintain and host any speech application. LumenVox's revolutionary speech recognition software products have gained industry recognition by winning over 17 awards for innovation, technical excellence, and user's choice. LumenVox can be reached at (877) 977-0707 or at www.LumenVox.com .