Vocalis wins South African contract for SpeechMail

Vocalis, the international speech technologies group, has signed its first contract in South Africa.

The contract is with Internet Service Provider (ISP) World Online (http://www.worldonline.co.za/), which will offer the Vocalis SpeechMail system to its 100,000 subscribers across the whole of South Africa.

SpeechMail, developed by Vocalis, allows email users to access their emails over the telephone, using a combination of Advanced Speech Recognition and text-to-speech technologies. SpeechMail is already widely used by many leading ISPs, including BT Internet, Cable &Wireless and Freeserve.

"We are pleased to have signed this contract with World Online, which has a major presence in the developing South African Internet market," said Charles Halle, Chief Executive of Vocalis. "We see great potential in this region, and are delighted to have World Online as a partner in this fast growing market."

"Giving our customers the facilities of SpeechMail is an important addition to our product offering," said Francois Swart, Manager of New Product Development, for World Online.

"We aim to provide a comprehensive range of Internet-related services, and it is clear that many people want to have access to their emails while they are travelling, or away from their PCs. SpeechMail has proved itself to be a well designed, robust, speech-based application that enables them to do precisely that."