Telisma Delivers ASR for South African English and Afrikaans

Telisma today announced the availability of automatic speech recognition (ASR) in South African English and Afrikaans.

The two languages are now available with teliSpeech Recognizer, telisma’s network speech recognition engine. Along with existing teliSpeech languages, the new offerings can be used on all leading interactive voice response (IVR) platforms including: Avaya, Cisco, Envox-Syntellect, Genesys, HP, Holly, OnMobile, Voxeo, and more.

These new language packs are the result of the collaboration between telisma and its South African partner, CatchWord, a pioneer in the sector of speech technologies in Southern Africa.

With over 42 million mobile subscribers, South Africa is the fourth fastest growing mobile communications market in the world. Southern Africa’s linguistic variety is a true challenge for voice services access, as it gathers at least 11 official languages within the region.

South African English is spoken in South Africa and in neighboring countries with a large number of Anglo-Africans living in them, such as Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho.

Afrikaans is mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia, with smaller numbers of speakers living in Botswana, Angola, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Zambia, Australia, New Zealand, United States of America, Taiwan, and Argentina.

True to its commitment of enabling each and every person in the world to access voice services over the telephone using their own language, telisma continues to invest in expanding its language coverage and widen its presence in Southern Africa.