By David Sims
[email protected]
The news on speech recognition technology as of the first
coffee this morning, and the music is Beggar’s
Banquet by The Rolling Stones, the 1968 kickoff album to their great
five-album run culminating with 1972’s Exile
On Main Street:
We’ve been rather
neglectful of speech technology here at First CoffeeSM, it’s recently been brought to
our attention, and for this we apologize. So here’s a special edition dedicated
solely to the news in speech technologies:
SoftMed Systems, a provider of healthcare
information products, has announced the
release of ChartScript ASP, a hosted product for transcription, speech
recognition and computer-aided medical transcription.
ChartScript ASP lets healthcare facilities and transcription
providers use transcription technology without incurring the resource expense
and capital investment costs of maintaining a large transcription portal and
speech recognition server, company officials claim.
And the fact that it’s a hosted product means the investment
costs can be shared among multiple enterprises.
The problem is that healthcare facilities – what we used to
call “hospitals,” I guess – today are faced with rising transcription costs, a
shrinking labor pool of transcriptionists, and increased documentation demands.
There’s your hot career for the ‘00s, kids – transcriptionist. Earn the big
bucks, meet girls, avoid college loans, learn to drive the big rigs in the
privacy of your own home, make money while you sleep, step right up, if you act
before midnight tonight (slap) whew. Thanks.
ChartScript ASP is designed to help facilities maximize
transcription productivity, reduce costs and turnaround time, and improve
transcription quality and accuracy with deferred speech recognition.
The product is advertised as allowing hospitals to augment
their transcription services without large upfront costs and the ongoing IT
support costs associated with owning technology. It can be used by in-house transcriptionists
or outsourced transcription services.
Company officials say SoftMed’s deferred speech recognition
product requires no change in physicians’ preferred dictation habits. This is a
good thing, because we all know how much doctors like changing their habits.
…
Interactive voice response and speech self-service vendors Gold Systems
have announced an agreement
to partner with LeadingC, a developer of speech recognition and Internet
technologies.
Both Gold Systems and LeadingC create speech self-service
applications using platforms from vendors like Avaya, IBM, Microsoft, and
Nuance Communications. The partnership allows both companies to co-market
packaged applications, expand service offerings, and share engineering
resources across their offices in North America and Asia.
“Gold Systems has partnered with LeadingC for their
technical expertise on specific projects in the past,” said Terry Gold,
president and CEO of Gold Systems.
LeadingC has expertise with VoiceXML, computer telephony
integration and hosted speech applications. With such additional technical
capabilities, Gold Systems can offer customers an expanded set of products and
professional services, officials say.
In turn, Gold officials believe LeadingC will benefit from
Gold Systems’ business development capabilities, project management strengths,
and Gold Systems’ client base of Global 1000 customers.
…
Beggar’s Banquet
is over, so let’s keep the sequence going with the Stones’ 1969 album Let It Bleed, as much a leap forward
from Beggar’s Banquet as that album
was from the radio pop which preceded it.
…
One thing you have to
watch out for with IVR is down time. Significant downtime
affecting operations during a disaster can result in bankruptcy for a business,
according to a recent Gartner Group survey. There are services to help
businesses avoid complications from service-disrupting disasters, such as the
one provided by Message Technologies, Inc., an international provider of speech
IVR outsourcing services.
Disasters are quickly becoming no excuse for downtime.
According to Frost & Sullivan, because of the high-probability of man-made
and natural disasters, companies that outsource speech IVR and call center
services immensely benefit by selecting a provider that offers redundant
facilities in geographically distinct locations.
Bear in mind that while power protection assets may have
been specified and paid for by the call center, according to Contact
Center Disaster Recovery, “it is unlikely that support responsibility
remains with your operation. More likely it is with the facilities department,
the IT department or the site maintenance department.”
Physical access to the site may be controlled by an
automated system maintained by building or physical security; call center
management has control only over access to its own department. Human resources
typically sets policy on the return of access control badges upon employment
termination and change of privileges upon internal transfer.
“The year 2005 was a catalyst to make disaster recovery a
primary concern of companies that outsource speech IVR and call center
services,” said Krithi Rao, analyst with Frost & Sullivan. “Simply put,
disaster recovery facilities are quickly becoming an industry standard in this
market.”
A disaster recovery site would be located somewhere catering
to bandwidth-intensive projects. MTI’s disaster recovery site in Dallas, for
example, has twelve telecom switch companies and easy connectivity to any major
carrier since MTI’s needs to make sure that any customer can connect using
their existing telephone service provider. The highly redundant facility has
dual municipal power grids, battery and generator backup, and redundant
Internet connectivity.
Voice over Internet Protocol can help with this. VoIP can
play a particularly important role in disaster recovery and risk mitigation,
since with the latest, software-based distributed contact routing systems,
according to Interwise,
companies can ensure ongoing system availability, even during a crisis; support
agents in provisional remote locations far from your ACD; redirect voice
traffic in response to changing needs and resources; distribute calls to
home-based workers and/or third-party contact centers and deploy redundant
system capability at lower cost.
…
LumenVox, a Speech Recognition technology
vendor, has announced that Incendonet’s SpeechBridge family of
appliances now runs on their newest
Speech Engine release v6.0, for Linux.
“We are excited to incorporate LumenVox’s Linux version of
their Speech Engine into our SpeechBridge appliance,” said Tim Kruse, Vice
President of Sales and Business Development. “This Linux release allows
Incendonet to pursue an even broader range of end user customers by being able
to support both Windows and Linux platforms.”
Kruse said the integration with the Linux platform “did not
require us to change even a single line of code.”
The LumenVox Speech Engine is designed to provide developers
with a flexible API that performs recognition on audio data from any audio
source. The Speech Engine v6.0 includes server-side grammars, n-Best results,
and MRCP support.
“We felt it was critical to respond to market demand and
port our Speech Engine v6.0 to Linux, and are very pleased that Incendonet can
now offer a platform choice to their SpeechBridge customers,” said Ed Miller,
President of LumenVox.
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