Altitude Software, an independent global contact centre solutions vendor, Loquendo (News - Alert), a global speech technology provider, and SpeechVillage, a graphical tool for speech applications, announced an expansion of their joint offering.

This strategic partnership provides new solutions with next generation natural language technology to voice-enable self-service options for a broad range of advanced contact centre solutions.

The joint offering integrates the Loquendo MRCP Server, certified to work with Altitude Voice Portal. The Loquendo MRCP Server is a server-based solution for large-scale deployments of automated telephony applications integrating Loquendo multilingual speech technologies, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text To Speech (TTS), in order to give a real human touch to automated communications.

Explaining the benefits of Loquendo integration, Massimiliano Ferrero, EMEA director at Loquendo said, “The Altitude Voice Portal, combined with Loquendo's innovative speech technology, and SpeechVillage’s Dialogue Engine is a time and cost-effective solution that maintains high levels of customer satisfaction, while service productivity also improves and the contact centre increases its value to the operation.“

Discussing the partnership and its offering, Miguel Lopes, executive vice president of Altitude Software (News - Alert) said, “We are particularly proud of this combined offering. User friendly voice applications require expertise, technologies and tools.”

“Combined with other contact channels in Altitude uCITM, as part of a customer self-service solution, natural language technologies not only improve the user experience but also allow agents to focus on other, more value-added tasks,” he added.

Recently, European private equity fund IBI and global financial services group BBVA have acquired a majority of Altitude Software’s capital from Portuguese venture capital funds and private investors. The new shareholder structure now comprises of IBI (45 percent), BBVA (31 percent) and Tafin (24 percent). Tafin is an investment vehicle for Altitude’s CEO Gastão Taveira, which will continue to lead the company.