Cologne, GERMANY, Boston USA and Melbourne, AUSTRALIA – July 27, 2005 – VoiceObjects, the global leader of Voice Application Management Systems (VAMS) and Inference Communications, a leading innovator in speech application development technologies, today announced a partnership to integrate the Inference Grammar Trainer technology into VoiceObjects X5.
The ‘Inference Grammar Trainer’ (IGT) uses a revolutionary new method for the development of grammars for speech recognition applications, significantly reducing both application development and maintenance time and removing the requirement for specialized speech recognition development skills. The product is based on break-though ‘learning-by-example’ artificial intelligence technology developed at the research laboratories of Australia’s largest telecommunications company, Telstra Corporation. Application developers simply provide the Inference Grammar Trainer with examples of natural language utterances and the tool automatically develops highly sophisticated and accurate natural language grammars. The grammars can be updated very easily by providing examples of any new utterances that need to be included in the application.
From September, VoiceObjects X5 will provide developers with a direct link into the Inference Grammar Trainer tool. Further integration of the Inference Grammar Trainer into the VoiceObjects platform will occur in future releases of VoiceObjects' platform.
VoiceObjects provides its customers an open and flexible infrastructure to efficiently manage the whole life cycle of voice applications. Following the best-of-breed strategy, the partnership with Inference Communications will provide substantial value to customers using VoiceObjects X5.
VoiceObjects´ will offer the Inference Grammar Trainer in combination with VoiceObjects X5. VoiceObjects employs sales and professional service experts located in offices the United States, United Kingdom and Germany and is able to recommend the joint solution to a growing global distribution partner network.
Steve Telburn, CEO of Inference Communications said “Enterprises want to deploy true natural language applications because they are more powerful and customer friendly than traditional directed dialog applications, but until now they have been too expensive to develop and maintain. Our products automate the complex manual process of grammar development, so now all enterprises can afford to develop natural language applications. VoiceObjects has shown clear technology leadership in recognising that this is a superior and more cost effective way for their customers to develop applications in the future”.
Karl-Heinz Land, CEO of VoiceObjects said “Using our server-based Voice Application Management System, enterprises are able to easily deploy and efficiently manage highly sophisticated telephone services. Inference Grammar Trainer enables them to build up natural language grammars that incorporate individual manners of speaking, pronunciations, wordings and phraseologies. Now we are able to offer integration with a tool that simplifies the creation of voice applications that at the end perfectly understand what the callers want.”
