Anybody know about speechworks?
biz.yahoo.com
Tuesday June 13, 12:01 am Eastern Time
ATT invests in speech recognition company
PALO ALTO, Calif., June 13 (Reuters) - AT&T Corp (NYSE:T - news) Tuesday will announce it has invested in the voice recognition company SpeechWorks International Inc, in a move to improve its customer service and tie its business more closely to the Internet.
The company said it purchased a minority stake in Boston-based Speechworks, and granted Speechworks a license on a wide range or its own technologies with the goal of moving them out of the lab and turning them into products that will transform the customer experience.
AT&T said it expects new speech recognition technologies could make it easier for people to reach one another, perhaps by simply stating a name rather than dialing a number, and could help them browse the Web using spoken commands.
However, it said some of its immediate goals will be augmenting its ``How May I Help You'' service, which uses voice recognition in more than two billion calls a year.
The vision is to build on the service that currently asks a customer to ``press or say one,'' so, for example, it can handle more complicated tasks and process regular language requests. It uses the example of a customer who calls a service centre and says, ``I was calling my sister, but I guess I dialed a wrong number,'' and is automatically given a credit for the misplaced call.
AT&T said it will also explore ways to incorporate its technologies into an Internet ``voice portal'' that delivers online content in voice rather than text. Several start-up companies like TellMe and BeVocal have recently launched such voice portals to capture a piece of the Internet market as it shifts from the PC to wireless devices like cellphones. |
