IBM Brings the Power of Speech Technology to Telephony Through Partnership With Voice Control Systems
Strategic Alliance Enables Businesses to Provide Improved Automated Customer Service Over the Telephone At a Lower Cost
SOMERS, NY & DALLAS, TX (April 13, 1998) – – IBM, a world leader in speech recognition software, today announced a partnership with Voice Control Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: VCSI), a leading supplier of speech recognition software for telecommunications — accelerating the adoption of speech-driven telephony solutions by businesses. By marrying the power of advanced speech recognition with the telephone, businesses can provide automated services at a lower cost and can improve satisfaction by freeing their customers from the endless maze of keypad-driven menus, letting them use their voices to access information more quickly and easily.
As IBM’s primary path to market, VCS will deliver this technology for telephony applications to interactive voice response (IVR) and messaging/voice mail vendors. IBM will provide business partners and developers with large vocabulary speech engines and tools, based on its industry-leading, high accuracy, continuous speech recognition software, ViaVoice*. Through this agreement, business partners and developers will also have access to the speech engines currently available in VCS’ SpeechWave** software, which delivers continuous digits and medium vocabulary phonetic speech recognition. IBM and VCS will also provide training and application development support.
IBM and VCS will deliver a range of speech-enabled telephony solutions through developers and business partners. VCS will integrate both IBM and VCS technologies into interactive voice response (IVR), voice mail and messaging platforms, which will facilitate the development of applications. These telephony solutions will range from low-end applications for simple inquiries to high-end solutions for complex transactions. Many businesses, including financial institutions, travel and hospitality firms, telephone companies and call centers, will be able to work more efficiently and provide more customized, faster service by offering an alternative to the phone keypad and limited speech solutions that often leave customers frustrated.
“With years of expertise in speech technology and the retail success of our ViaVoice products, IBM is moving forward to bring the power of speech recognition technology to the enterprise,” said W.S. (Ozzie) Osborne general manager of IBM Speech Systems. “Teaming with VCS enables us to speed the proliferation of the most innovative speech-driven telephony solutions in businesses around the globe.”
Source: IBM