Recent Posts - page 152
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Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud Hovers Over VoiceCon
In a brief story in the back of its “Open Dialog” newsletter, Siemens Enterprise Communications’ analyst relations folks mention a “UC in the Cloud” proof of concept showcase at the company’s booth at VoiceCon 2009. Visitors will see how the Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform, which has been operated by Amazon.com for about three years now, can support a multiplicity of functions that are touted by the vendors of enterprise “unified communications” (UC) solutions. We would prefer to frame it as a “voice-in-the-cloud” offering because it adds intelligent call routing, message management and presence-based status indicators to multi-site, multi-vendor environments. Relying on Amazon Web Services means that the whole package is highly scalable and can be offered on a “pay-as-you-go” basis. -
Nu Echo Releases NuGram IDE Basic Edition
After six months in “beta”, speech application development specialist Nu Echo has made the “Basic Edition of its integrated development environment, NuGram generally available for free download. NuGram is fully integrated with Eclipse and is designed to provide the tools and programming environment to create, debug, tweak and maintain both static and dynamic grammars. In beta, it has proven itself to work with a broad spectrum of speech processing technologies. The company press release lists “Nuance GSL, Nuance OSR, Loquendo, IBM, LumenVox, and even Microsoft”. In addition, NuGram has been demonstrated to work “in conjunction” with VoiceXML service creation environments from a number of platform providers including Voxeo’s VoiceObjects, Cisco’s Unified Call Studio (nee Audium), openVXML, Nortel SCE, Avaya Dialog Designer among others. -
Welcome Back Cobol!
According to a press release, Voice Application Hosting innovator Voxeo is taking the future back to the past in a very effective way. One of the enhancements to its Tropo.com API-based development platform is support of the venerable COBOL programming language. While some people may refer to it as spaghetti, Voxeo CEO notes that “COBOL still has more installed lines of code than any other software language.” He accurately adds that “[b]anks, utilities, and other large corporations depend on COBOL for their billing and operations” and that these “legacy programs can immediately become speech enabled without any further effort.” -
Jaduka Service Uses Email to Trigger Outbound Voice Notification
The combination of voice services and Web 2.0 is definitely living up to its promise. It puts the emphasis on rapid deployment of new services through a variety of communications channels. Jaduka Voice Notification, which was formally announced yesterday at IDC’s SaaScon 2009, is a case in point. The new service enables companies to use email to launch outbound notification campaigns. -
Are Patents More Important in Challenging Times?
We’ve noticed a few more press releases than normal that mention the granting of voice processing patents. Most recently, Advanced Voice Recognition Systems (AVRS) announced that it has been granted its second significant patent in the area of speech recognition and transcription. The company says that its first patent, U.S. Patent #5,960,447, was granted in September 1999. It carried the title “Word Tagging and Editing System for Speech Recognition.” The second patent, which was disclosed this month, addresses speech recognition and transcription “among users having heterogeneous protocols.”We are neither lawyers nor patent experts but given that many of the commercial transcription services use a combination of speech processing and live agent intervention, this second patent is potentially very broad. In what could be construed as a threat to step up enforcement. Walter Geldenhuys, AVRS CEO and President, said that he believes the second patent “will enhance licensing and marketing opportunities.”
In a separate, and unrelated development, speech analytics specialist Utopy has been granted U.S. Patent #7,487,094 titled “System and method of call classification with context modeling based on composite words.” In this case, a company spokesperson told us that it is definitely “not an offensive patent.” Instead they see it as formal recognition of the fact that, in contrast to other speech analytics vendors, who take either a phoneme-based approach or resort to speech-to-text conversion before carrying out pattern recognition, Utopy’s methods are, indeed, unique.
It’s really a mouthful, but company co-founder Yochai Konig characterizes Utopy’s approach as “phrase-based contextual speech recognition-cum-understanding.” It provides the foundation for understanding live or recorded utterances in a single pass with both accuracy and completeness of understanding. It is an important component in business intelligence solutions that seek to link contact center and IVR performance with key business objectives. Utopy markets its solutions as premises-based, hosted or on-demand solutions.
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Skypee’s like It! (Skype on the iPhone and Other Rapid-Fire Innovations)
Skype for the iPhone will be available for download from the iTunes AppStore tomorrow (Tuesday March 31). In the mean time the Twittersphere has been atwitter with links to reviews from the telco luminaries at CNET and GigaOm with reviews that have been universally favorable. For those, like me, who found the most value in using Skype from the PC to make inexpensive international calls, word is that “it’s all that!” and much more. So it is that a wide variety of both enterprise- and service provider-oriented infrastructure vendors have accelerated introduction of solutions sets that integrate screen-supported handling or origination of voice calls, voicemail, chat, conferencing and related call processing. -
Biometric Authentication Plans for iPhone
In a post on AppleInsider reporter Aidan Malley is reporting a “stealth” development effort at Apple that could result in protecting iPhones with a selected biometric. According to the report, Apple published a patent filing indicating that it would use an embedded sensor or a component “repurposed from its original role” to capture biometric data that provides confidence that the individual trying to gain access to the whole device or to personal data on the device is, indeed, who he or she claims to be. -
Keep an Eye (or Ear) Out for RebelVox
Attendees at eComm 2009 witnessed the coming-out party of a new technology firm called RebelVox as VP of Technology Matt Ranney ran through the core capabilities of the firm’s suite of software. Growing out of the defense communications domain, RebelVox has patent-pending technologies that, when combined, provide users with the ability to toggle seamlessly between synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous (recorded or retrieved) communications. Its as if individuals engaged in a phone conversation or conference call could take Tivo like control of both the origination and playback of content. -
More YANCS Are Coming
More of the mobile world is coming around to seeing (hearing?) that one of the big problems with speech-enabled mobile applications has been failure to work in noisy environments. Hence the need for YANCS (or Yet Another Noise Cancellation Solution) like Audience, Inc., and Ditech Networks.
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Skype and Siemens Seek to Open Enterprise Telecom Infrastructure
Today a couple of leaders in the telecom infrastructure market past and future announced new products designed to encourage development of new telecom applications in business enterprises. Skype, prodded by the introduction of Google Voice, has accelerated the “beta” test of “Skype for SIP” (referring to the “session initiation protocol” that underlies virtually all Voice over IP-based services). The idea is for companies that have invested in VoIP phones and IP-telephony switches to use Skype as their VoIP carrier without having to involve software running on a PC in the mix.