SpeechCycle and Microsoft subsidiary Tellme announced yesterday a partnership in which SpeechCycle will deliver its Rich Phone Applications (RPAs) on Tellme’s hosted IVR platform. This partnership makes it easy for SpeechCycle to build and deploy voice-driven phone applications that allow callers to simply say what they need and quickly access the information or services that fulfill their service requests.

Built on the Microsoft .NET framework, SpeechCycle’s RPAs enable enterprises to rapidly connect their back-end systems with natural-language-based speech interfaces and quickly respond to their customers as they deliver new products and services. The RPAs also integrate voice user interfaces with enterprise and Web applications to deliver a richer, more immersive caller experience. "The term rich derives from the fact that our application is characterized by very high connectivity with many different types of devices out there," says SpeechCycle’s chief technology officer Roberto Pieraccini. Pieraccini emphasizes that this connectivity—in which the application might communicate with diagnostic devices, telephony platforms, or CRM databases—is the future of consumer speech applications.   

"The application at the center is like a hub, where one of the spokes is the caller," Pieraccini explains. "The other spokes are the devices and databases and services. There’s enough intelligence to make sense of all this in an interesting way and interact with the caller." 

The integration with Tellme supports the company’s belief that people accessing services should be able to say what they want to get it. TellMe’s platform currently powers business searches on 411 and the information search service 1-800-555-TELL.

"SpeechCycle delivers impressive customer care solutions for some of the most demanding enterprises.  By opening Tellme's platform to SpeechCycle customers, together we can deliver an end-to-end self-service solution with the most advanced thinking in self-service design, Web data integration and speech technologies," Jamie Bertasi, senior director of business solutions at Tellme, said in a statement.