Vocalis Signs New Distributor for Sweden and Norway, and Becomes First Provider of Dual Language 'e-mail by phone'

Vocalis, the international speech technology Group, and Arico AB in Sweden have signed a system supply and distributor agreement. Arico AB will be an application provider based on the 'e-mail by phone and SpeecHTML' systems and so provide exclusive services to their customer base in Sweden and Norway. As part of the Distributor agreement Arico AB will be also responsible for marketing and supporting the Vocalis product range, throughout Sweden and Norway.

Products include: -

	SPEECHtel - Special Resource Function (SRF) and speech driven application platform for telephone network operators to automate new and value add services
	SpeecHTML - Allows access to Websites via a telephone and spoken commands
	SpeechMail - Enables users to access e-mails over the telephone using simple voice commands for "play", "reply", "delete" and "next message"

Arico AB has placed an order for an e-mail by phone system and a new online phone hotel booking application. Arico will offer the e-mail by phone exclusively as a value-added service to its customer base. This makes Vocalis the first provider of dual language e-mail reading capability. Using the latest advances in speech recognition and cutting edge text-to-speech technology, users will be able to access, delete and respond to e-mail messages by using the telephone. Vocalis has integrated two TTS within one single solution, for Swedish and English.

The hotel booking application allows individual hotels to update a web server with details of the latest room vacancies and offers. Customers will call a national rate telephone number for a particular area they are interested in staying and will be given details of room availability and last minute offers.

Arne Bergbrant from Arico AB, says, "Using Vocalis' leading-edge technology we will be able to investigate the most efficient and user friendly ways of deploying speech driven applications in the telephone network. The introduction of the email by phone and hotel booking service will be a value added service to our customers." Arico plans to create more than 50 new jobs in Sweden as part of this service.

Peter Hauser, Sales Director for Vocalis, adds "Vocalis are delighted to provide Arico with the latest telecommunications technology for business. This ensures they can offer their customers the best value added service. Email by Phone has proven solid success in many installations and is ideally suited to create new competitive services for Application providers. The Hotel application demonstrates the commercial flexibility of our systems to integrate Phone access to Web-content for a new variety of applications related to e-commerce. This ensures that Arico can offer their customers the best possible service package. We look forward to a successful partnership."