Intel Corporation in association with a group of Middle Eastern companies unveiled technology that provides the world's first Arabic language voice portal.
The development work undertaken by Intel, the US chipmaker, the Kuwaiti company Sakhr and the Abu Dhabi company Emerging Technologies now offers as a first, Arabic-enabled Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) application, and brings Arabic language voice and enhanced services over IP networks in the Middle East region.
Utilising speech technologies, the collaboration between the companies will merge the flexibility of IP with the convenience of the telephone, to offer services to corporate customers and consumers.
Under a loose and broad development arrangement, Intel, Sakhr, and Emerging Technolgies, will jointly market end-to-end voice hosting solutions to companies, call centers, broadband service providers and a customer subscriber user base. While Intel will provide the hardware and the hosting platform, Emerging Technologies will build voice applications, and provide support and professional services. Sakhr Software will provide the team with an Arabic-enabled voice engine and the English language voice engines will be provided by Nuance.
Jointly, their ASR offering will enable customers to replace costly interactive voice response systems (IVRs) with efficient, network-based speech recognition and telephony solutions, thus freeing employees for more demanding tasks.
The joint offering lies in the design and development of telephone systems to conduct these automated interactions with human callers, via computer-controlled interviews. The interviews are composed of a network of response contexts set up as a series of questions and answers, where in each response context, there is a range of likely spoken responses by the caller. Such computer-controlled interviews are appropriate for the development of information, enquiry and reservation systems; unified messaging; automatic secretary functions; customer surveys; financial transaction systems, Internet and email browsing via voice; remote control of computer systems; e-learning and distance learning, and in a variety of other tasks.
Referred to as 'tip of the tongue technology', ASR significantly reduces hardware requirements. Additionally, business customers will benefit from cost savings in overheads, manpower needs, and network transit costs previously associated with deploying voice-enhanced services to their customers. Live demonstrations will be conducted during the course of GITEX before a full launch of the services during the month of Ramadan. — (menareport.com)
© 2002 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
