A partnership relation has been reached between SpeechCycle and Loquendo to deliver the industry’s first end-to-end offering for building and deploying Rich Phone (News - Alert) Applications, which deliver unparalleled customer experiences.

The enterprise developers and system integrators, through this partnership – which combines the power of Loquendo’s ASR and TTS engines and VoxNauta VoiceXML (News - Alert) browser with SpeechCycle’s industry-leading RPA Express platform, now have everything they need to deliver the next-generation of speech-enabled customer interaction management solutions to meet the needs of enterprise contact centers worldwide.

“We are excited about this partnership because it allows us to continue to lower the barriers to entry for rapid development and deployment of voice and multi-modal self service solutions,” Zor Gorelov (News - Alert), CEO of SpeechCycle, says. “Speech recognition is a key capability for RPAs that combine touch, text and talk interfaces on the phone and smartphone. Loquendo (News - Alert) is a recognized leader in speech ASR, TTS and VoiceXML platforms and we are impressed with the performance of its technology.”

Large-scale vocabulary continuous speech, even in mixed and noisy environments, such as on mobile or VoIP devices are recognized by Loquendo ASR, which is next-generation speech recognition – multilingual and speaker-independent.

Currently available in 30 languages with more under development, Loquendo TTS is highly fluent synthetic speech and offers natural-sounding, expressive speech, in both male and female voices. VoxNauta, the Loquendo CCXML and VoiceXML platform is among the few Voice Portal platforms on the market formally certified by the VoiceXML Forum as compliant with the VoiceXML 2.1 standard. These speech technologies power services handling millions of calls everyday worldwide.

“RPA Express is the most advanced platform for building and deploying highly sophisticated, speech-enabled customer interaction management solutions that can take full advantage of Loquendo speech technologies,” Davide Franco (News - Alert), CEO at Loquendo, said. “This is a global partnership and together we have the opportunity to leverage SpeechCycle’s ability to develop self-service solutions that enhance the customer experience.”

For the composition, enterprise integration and performance measurement of Rich Phone Applications, RPA Express works as a completely unified platform which includes RPA Transact, a highly scalable speech and multi-modal application server, RPA Orchestrate, a connectivity framework for dynamic mashup and integration of enterprise applications and RPA Compose, an easy-to-use WYSIWYG authoring environment.

To automate common business functions with built-in best practices for voice interaction design and RPA Dashboard, a Web-based reporting environment for detailed performance measurement that drives continuous application improvements, the platform also includes a set of pre-tested, customizable dialog components, called RPA Interaction Providers.

“Self-service professionals need to balance the demand for speed-to-deploy against requirements for reliability and an outstanding customer experience,” Dan Miller, senior analyst at Opus Research, explained. “This partnership will have a broad impact on the industry because the nature and context of business-to-consumer dialogs vary so broadly, and enterprises will reap great benefit from a tight partnership between speech-processing and application processing resources.”

In related news, SpeechCycle, the premier provider of Rich Phone Applications, powers innovative customer interaction solutions for contact centers around the world, has announced the general availability of RPA Express.