I recently had the opportunity to speak with Aculab (News - Alert) product manager Herman Abel regarding the company’s latest initiatives revolving around speech and VoiceXML.

 

I asked Abel about the recently announced “Easy Speech” bundle — which is being offered at an introductory price for a limited time — and what it means for developers of speech applications.

 

Here’s what Herman had to say.

 

“We introduced this bundle because we see there is a market need for some cost effective ways to migrate existing IVR solutions based on DTMF recognition. Basically the package we offer includes a Prosody X card from Aculab, which is used for both media processing and call control. We also provide four licenses of VoiceXML (News - Alert) and CCXML interpreter.

 

“In addition we cooperated with a company called LumenVox (News - Alert), and they provide four licenses of their ASR engine for automatic speech recognition. Of course we will offer comprehensive, free of charge technical support to help developers progress their solutions as quickly and smoothly as possible.”

 

The offering is only a few weeks old, but Abel says that there has been some movement and some interest in the Easy Speech bundle.

 

Said Abel, “The special offer will be available until the end of October, but we do see significant levels of interest in this package. We are in advanced discussions with some prospects.”

 

Addressing the fact that the bundle does not contain any significantly novel individual components, Abel told me, “We understand that all these components are available from third parties as well, — there is nothing really new. The point is you can get everything competitively priced from one particular vendor, and you can also get help with developing an application because this bundle also includes a “demo app.” And the technical support…? That’s what will really help developers to progress.”

 

Aculab recently announced their participation in the VoiceXML Forum, an organization that was formed to create and promote VoiceXML and drive market acceptance of the standard through a wide array of speech-enabled applications.

 

I asked Abel his thoughts on why now was the right time for Aculab to enter into this alliance.

 

“Aculab joined the VoiceXML forum as part of our efforts to promote VoiceXML technology,” he told me, “but also to help promote a product which we recently launched, our VoiceXML and CCXML Interpreter software. This new product offers quite a lot of advantages to the telephony solutions developer community, because for the first time they get an industry standard interface through which they can communicate and operate Aculab’s telephony hardware.”

 

I asked Abel to explain the benefits of the Interpreter software, for both the developer community and for Aculab themselves.

 

“Previously they [developers] always had to use Aculab’s API in all the applications they were writing. With the VoiceXML and CCXML Interpreter, we provide the ability to write applications, which will be telephony card agnostic so the benefit for the developers is they don’t necessarily link the applications to Aculab forever. The benefit for Aculab is that if someone already has a VoiceXML and CCXML application developed for a competitive telephony platform, we offer an easy migration path to utilize Aculab and because our telephony hardware is very competitively priced and also very feature rich, we do see significant interest to migrate existing voice xml applications to run on Aculab technology.

 

“A significant part of the market is looking to develop applications in a telephony card agnostic way, which would allow developers to focus on their core expertise and the core value in the application.”

 

Abel continued, “From the developer’s perspective, writing to VoiceXML and CCXML — it’s a scripting language — and it is simpler to write to, and it requires a lower developer’s skill set. Basically it’s a simpler and more cost effective way of developing software. In addition, because VoiceXML is a scripting language that supports integration with JAVA, it’s a path for developers to start utilizing more of the Internet or Web technologies into telephony. That is very significant because for a lot of telephony automated services there is a need for very tight integration with back office and also very tight integration with existing Web portals and Web technologies and using VoiceXML is the best way to do it.”

 

I asked Abel about to share his thoughts on the coming 6–12 months and what the future has in store for Aculab from a product perspective.

 

“I believe this year we will continue to focus on our core product line which is ProsodyX,” Abel said.

 

Aculab has achieved tremendous success with its Prosody X media processing platform, delivering products to 114 customers worldwide, with a significant total media processing capacity suitable to serve beyond 300,000 voice ports.

 

Abel continued, “We’ll keep promoting this product line and we’ll keep adding new functionality, enhancing the value of the product line, to make this product appealing to a broader community of developers. In particular, we will be announcing the release of wideband voice support for both wideband communication and wideband media processing like conferencing. In fact Aculab is already engaged in one of the largest industry’s initiatives in that area.

 

“We are confident that we will announce support for video as an alternative media to voice on the same Prosody X platform probably in the first half of next year,” Abel added. “And we’ll make first products available at that time.”

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