Speech-World News & Definitions

CallMiner Reduces Hardware For Speech Analytics
CallMiner (news - alerts), a developer of enterprise class speech analytics software,'has announced the commercial release and deployment of its Virtual Server Room (VSR) technology. VSR, combined with CallMiner's speech processing and'analytics'suite, can help enable call centers to deploy medium- and large-scale speech analytics implementations with less hardware than previously required. VSR, according to the company, has the potential to change the speech analytics landscape, because companies'need no longer engage in partial mining and sacrifice data due to hardware constraints.'

Other solutions, according to CallMiner, do not offer high processing power to mine 100 percent of all recorded calls in medium and large speech analytics deployments. Therefore, most recorded data are not analyzed, and valuable business intelligence is lost or ignored. With VSR, a company's unused computing resources are used to power CallMiner's speech processing engine, eliminating the need for'costly single-purpose servers required for speech analytics implementations. VSR employs the unused or idle processing power within a network to process large volumes of recorded audio for use by CallMiner's analytics. Though VSR is now being exclusively used with CallMiner's speech-analytics, it can also be customized to power other computer-intensive enterprise software applications. www.callminer.com.

VoiceGenie And Convedia Partner
VoiceGenie Technologies Inc. (news - alerts), a supplier of standards-based media controller software, and Convedia Corporation (news - alerts), which produces IP media servers, have announced that their Multimedia Resource Function (MRF) component for IP Multimedia Subsystems is ready for demonstration. Highlighting a key enabler for mobile service providers ' a componentized IMS solution for delivering speech, touch-tone and visually-enabled applications ' demonstrations, to be arranged with either Convedia or VoiceGenie, aim to help customers realize the potential of the value-added services, which combine spoken, touch-tone and visual interactions.

The combined VoiceGenie and Convedia solution delivers a Media Resource Function (MRF) for 3G, IMS and Fixed Mobile Convergence deployments. Convedia's IP media server processes multiple media resources and VoiceGenie's media controller controls the interactions between media and speech servers to deliver rich interactive services to users, regardless of the devices, protocols and networks they are using www.voicegenie.com and www.convedia.com

Definition Du Jour Artificial Neural Network (ANN) An Artificial Neural Network is a basic, computerized model of the pathways and network of the human brain, or a 'biologically inspired' method of computing. The process of storing information as patterns and utilizing those patterns, as the brain does, and then solving problems based on the information, is considered by some to be a next-generation method of computing. Artificial Neural Network processes can allow for better pattern recognition and learning on the part of the computer, which is why the method is highly applicable to speech recognition.

'The written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression.'
' R.G. (Robin George) Collingwood (1889'1943), British philosopher
Voxeo Announces Prophecy
Voxeo Corporation (news - alerts), a provider of voice application platforms, has announced Voxeo Prophecy, a new platform designed to make it easier and more affordable for enterprises to create and deploy speech applications. Voxeo Prophecy was designed to eliminate traditional barriers to enterprise speech deployment by bundling a full-featured telephony platform with speech recognition and synthesis at less than one-fifth the cost of previous offerings.

Prophecy is a speech platform, a versatile voice-over-IP (VoIP) platform and an interactive voice response (IVR) platform, all rolled into a single software download. With an abundance of telephony features, Prophecy also aims to deliver improved functionality over previous offerings. According to the company, Prophecy breaks through traditional industry barriers by providing high-quality speech recognition and speech synthesis capabilities at no additional cost, making it 'the first telephony platform that enables developers to easily and cost-effectively add speech functionality to telephony applications.' Other Prophecy features include call conferencing, call recording, comprehensive SIP-based VoIP telephony support, a built-in soft-phone, the SQLite database engine, and a Web server supporting PHP 5.1 and Java/JSP, all in a single 80 megabyte download with zero configuration requirements. www.voxeo.com