Speech-to-text translation is one of the most promising features of today's communications technologies.

 

For starters, it dramatically enhances a user's experience and keeps voicemail relevant in a world where people don't want to be listening to messages just to be told to call someone back, said Robert Pettiford, AVP of Commercial Products at Frontier Communications.

 

Today, the technology offers immense growth opportunities for companies eager to develop and deploy it.

 

To compete huge market opportunity, Metaswitch Networks, which provides technologies and solutions to enable migration of communications networks to open, next-generation architectures, announced it has enhanced its unified messaging portfolio to include speech-to-text transcription capabilities from Nuance.

 

Through its flagship CommPortal platform, the company already delivers a rich "multi-screen" experience, where users can visually manage their calls and voicemails through smart mobile devices, the PC desktop, Web pages, IP-enabled business phones, Web widgets and TV set-top boxes, say company officials.

 

With the integration of speech-to-text transcription capabilities, users will now be able to convert wireless and wireline network voicemail messages into SMS texts or e-mail, and deliver the transcription directly to a network subscriber's screen of choice.

 

As the Nuance (News - Alert) voicemail-to-text technology is integrated directly into the Metaswitch platform, service providers can quickly and cost-effectively deploy the service based on their existing Metaswitch service agreement, reducing time-to-market and providing a rapid return on investment, the company said.

 

Metaswitch's platform provides a single point of storage for wireline, wireless and fax messages.  The latest enhancements add support for text transcription within both the message store and multiple end-user application interfaces, the company said.

 

With the new capability, users are freed from personally transcribing messages; additionally, they can save and search the content. The solution initially supports a variety of languages, within a framework that can be easily extended.

 

"The Nuance voicemail-to-text service is carrier-optimized and designed to address today's dynamic communications demands," said John Pollard, vice president, Voice-to-Text Services, Nuance.

 

Pollard said he thinks Metaswitch is the perfect partner for Nuance, especially when it comes to expanding Nuance's global voice-to-text footprint, because Metaswitch's network solutions reach a broad range of customers worldwide and provide an ideal platform to demonstrate the power and inherent business value of voicemail-to-text.

 

"Metaswitch is committed to delivering innovative voicemail solutions that meet today's customers' needs with technology that can scale quickly and easily," said Andy Randall, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Metaswitch. "Integration of a carrier-grade voicemail-to-text solution allows us to meet both of those objectives, while delivering transcriptions of the highest possible accuracy."

Metaswitch recently announced that Cooperative Mariano Moreno will be offering advanced voice services from Metaswitch to the community of Nueve de Jolio located to the southwest of Buenos Aires, Argentina, TMCnet reported.