Metaphor Solutions And XO Interactive Forge Reseller Agreement
Metaphor Solutions and XO Interactive (XOI) have announced a reseller agreement for XOI to deploy Metaphor's speech IVR applications on XOI's hosting infrastructure. The partnership enables XOI to offer all 30 packaged and configurable Metaphor applications and use its lifecycle management tools as part of XOI's teleservices offering. Metaphor provides more than 30 packaged speech IVR applications in markets that include financial services, retail, healthcare and the enterprise. Examples of speech applications include telephone banking, bill collection, prescription refill, location finder, inventory and pricing request, customer surveys, password reset and literature request, as well as SpeechOutlook, which allows travelers to name-dial any one of thousands of Outlook contacts by calling just one number. These applications allow companies to deploy speech solutions on popular IVR platforms quickly and at a lower total cost of ownership, while still maintaining a high standard of automated service using speech. In addition, Metaphor offers customers and partners a suite of Web-based, application life-cycle management tools that include Application Configuration, Report Generation and Application Monitoring, as well as a development environment based on C# and .NET technologies, enabling IT developers to more easily customize and deploy speech applications.
www.metaphorsol.com

Loquendo Releases ASR 7.0 Solution
Speech technology provider Loquendo has announced the release of its Loquendo ASR 7.0 product. The new release for Loquendo Automatic Speech Recognition offers new features and, according to the company, represents a significant step forward in terms of automatic speech interaction. The new integration API has been redesigned to simplify integration tasks and better exploit multithread environments. System integrators can take advantage of them for integration in advanced environments such as Microsoft .NET and Java. With Acoustic Model Composition, speech application developers can achieve enhanced voice recognition performance for specific tasks. By employing either Standard or Specialized Acoustic Models, a more flexible performance is possible in various diverse speech contexts: the recognition of a specific vocabulary (e.g., a string of digits, specialized command words, yes-no responses), the recognition of speech from a variety of audio channels, (e.g., VoIP, GSM/UMTS), and recognition in particular sound environments (e.g., in-car). Loquendo ASR selects the most appropriate types of Acoustic Model, based on the grammar in use, and allows the simultaneous recognition of grammars based on different Acoustic Models. In this new software release, the voice recognition performance for the German language has been further refined and improved to better support customer needs.
www.loquendo.com

Definition Du Jour
WOZ (Wizard of Oz) Testing
The process of creating a mockup of a new speech application and then listening live to callers' interaction with the system for the purpose of usability testing. The Wizard of Oz reference comes from the fact that the user is unaware he or she is being tested by the proverbial 'man behind the curtain'.

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