VOCALIS ANNOUNCES JOINT DEVELOPMENT WITH ERICSSON AND TELECOM EIREANN

Vocalis, the Cambridge based speech recognition Telephony Company, announced today a further order for SPEECHtel, it’s intelligent network peripheral platform. The order is from Ericsson’s Network Intelligence Design Centre in Dublin for a SPEECHtel platform, Service Creation Environment and training.

The order by Ericsson is for joint development of advanced speech driven Intelligent Network services, with Telecom Eireann, an existing Ericsson and Vocalis customer. The project will develop applications that will exploit the power of speech recognition. These speech applications will replace tone-based services that force the general public to navigate complex multi-layer menus, and which are increasingly becoming unacceptable. Also to be investigated will be the most efficient Intelligent Network (IN) architecture to deploy these services.

"Given the choice people prefer to speak, " comments Andy Walker, Product Marketing Manager for Vocalis. "For the first time Network Operators will be able to rapidly prototype and deploy speech applications using SPEECHtels powerful development tools."

Pat Foley, Account Director at Ericsson explains "Having worked with Vocalis before we were confident in their products and services. Using their 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."

Ericsson and Telecom Eireann plan to start work immediately on implementing a service that will use Vocalis’ leading edge speech recognition technology to provide an Intelligent Network based call routing capability.