Teknowledge Wins Phase II Navy Contract on Dialog Agent System for Distance Learning
PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec 24, 2001 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Teknowledge
Corporation (Nasdaq: TEKC) announced today that it has been selected as a
project award winner in the U.S. Navy's Small Business Innovative Research
(SBIR) competition. Teknowledge was awarded a Phase II SBIR to provide research,
development and demonstration of a Dialog Agent System for distance learning.
This contract follows Teknowledge's successfully completed Phase I contract
award. The Phase II contract award is for $750,000.
The Navy, Army, Air Force and Marine Corps must train their personnel to high
levels of skill and knowledge to deal with increasingly complex equipment and a
wider range of missions. Distance learning has been identified as an enabling
technology that can contribute to this goal significantly.
Most current computer and web-based training systems present multimedia material
with very limited ability to dialog interactively and adapt to the user's
learning needs. Teknowledge's Dialog Agent System will incorporate best-in-class
components for speech recognition, natural language understanding,
domain-specific knowledge processing, language generation, and speech synthesis.
These components will provide extensible and interactive training interfaces, as
well as hybrid error recovery techniques. The Dialog Agent System will employ
these technologies to support flexible instructional strategies and more
satisfying user interactions.
Neil Jacobstein, Teknowledge's President and CEO said: "Enabling a computer to
dialog like a human will continue to be an elusive research goal for many years.
There currently are no computer systems that can converse as smoothly, broadly,
and in depth as a human. However, there have been significant incremental
advances in dialog systems within restricted domains of knowledge. Depending on
the application requirements, there are a number of feasible approaches for
developing a domain-specific dialog system for mentoring and tutoring
applications. Teknowledge's current target domain is directed at defense
applications, but the training software infrastructure is dual-use. We expect to
apply it in the years ahead to financial application domains. This Training
Systems project will utilize technology developed in Teknowledge's Knowledge
Systems operating unit. It is an example of the strong competitive foundation
that Teknowledge is building for delivering innovative defense and financial
application software systems."
Teknowledge Corporation provides software and consulting services. It delivers
the TekPortal(TM) account aggregation software solution for financial
institutions. Teknowledge increases its competitive edge through
defense-sponsored contract research and development in Internet security,
Web-based training, distributed systems and knowledge processing. It holds an
extensive intellectual property portfolio, with nine key software patents.
Teknowledge is 20 years old, and has been profitable for 29 consecutive
quarters. More information about Teknowledge may be found at
www.teknowledge.com.
This press release contains forward-looking statements relating to the demand,
market acceptance, and anticipated growth of products and services offered by
the Company that are subject to a high level of uncertainty. All forward-looking
statements involve risk and uncertainties, and actual results could differ
materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements contained
herein. |
