Telecommunications groups put their trust in the power of the voice

Telenor Mobil and Telefonos de Mexico to use Vocalis SPEECHtel telephony platform in order to deliver higher levels of service to their customers.

Vocalis, the Cambridge based speech technology company, today announced two major new contracts for its SPEECHtel telephony platform worth a combined total of 655,000. The new orders from Ericsson are for Telenor Mobil, Norways leading telecommunications and IT supplier and Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex), Mexico's leading telecommunications operator.

The Telenor contract is valued at 395,000. This represents an upgrade to the Vocalis systems that are already live in the Telenor environment. The system enables Telenors mobile customers to find out how much credit they have left on their mobile phones and the original system has proven so successful that there was a requirement for a greater handling capacity due to significantly higher traffic. This order for two SPEECHtel platforms (CS1 IP), together with the original platform, have been upgraded to Vocalis SPEECHtel 5, which includes new signalling and more efficient capacity.

The Telmex order is to upgrade the current SPEECHtel telephony platforms installed at a number of its sites across Mexico. The contract worth 260,000, includes the provision of consultancy services.

We are naturally delighted to receive these orders from Telenor and Telmex, which illustrate that business benefits have been realised by the two companies, resulting from the implementation of SPEECHtel solutions. said Paul Wright, Chief Operating Officer, Vocalis. About SPEECHtel SPEECHtel is a peripheral platform for use in intelligent networks that offers a suite of applications, allowing licensed operators to quickly and easily develop and deploy a wide range of cost saving and customer friendly services. SPEECHtel is a field proven system now used by major telecommunications operators and other networking organisations across the Americas, Europe, and the Far East.

SPEECHtel applications are based on SpeechWare, Vocalis own advanced speech recognition technology, and the new SPEECHtel, one of the most advanced of its kind, now offers full support for the latest release of SpeechWare, Vocalis SpeechWare 6.4.

Other new features of SPEECHtel include:

• New operating system: SCO Unixware 7
• Increased capacity
• Support for a wide range of signalling protocols, both industry-standard and proprietary
• Hardware platform independence
• Native support for text-to-speech
• Applications, including Vocalis SpeechMail for voice-based access to emails, automated handling of collect calls, automated directory
• inquiries, and others
• Excellent support for Internet-based services and mobile communications operations