The deployment as a milestone in a couple of respects. The mobile market holds huge potential for speaker authentication for customer care and electronic payments. In addition, Vodafone Turkey clearly sees subscriber authentication as a source of differentiation in a long-standing battle for share versus Turkcell. In that pursuit, SPEECHOUSE has successfully integrated speaker authentication into the IVR-based Vodafone Voice Portal Platform. The immediate result is the use of a spoken password for secure self service applications the mobile equivalent of password reset, GSM PUK (Personal Unlocking Key) reset.

We’ll be learning more about the details and timing of the complete in the coming days to include in an advisory, and in our long-standing set of company and deployment dossiers.

Among the speech processing community, OnMobile made news in May 2008 with its purchase of the French automated speech processing specialist, Telisma. Since the acquisition, top management has denied that Telisma’s technology will replace existing solutions and services, which are based on a long-standing partnership with Nuance. In a report filed by Nikhil Pahwa, in Medianama, a Web site covering multimedia developments in India, OnMobile Global’s CEO Arvind Rao said definitively that Telisma was not acquired as a replacement for Nuance and that the cost of Nuance licenses are included in the delivery platform for existing services.

Yet Rao acknowledged that the company has developed Malay and Thai language models for Telisma and were in the process of developing 4 African language capabilities. The justification is shorter time to market and lower development costs.