Nuance Communications unveiled Nuance Recognizer v9, a new speech recognition engine. The development project is code named Quantum.

By combining the elements of the speech recognition engines brought together by Nuance over the past five years - along with entirely new technologies developed in Nuance research labs - Nuance Recognizer is designed to understand what users mean, not just what they say. The solution showcases advances in semantic and language modeling to improve the ability to interpret a caller's open-ended response, as well as the enhanced capability of extracting multiple pieces of relevant information from that response. P>

"Nuance is responding to a marketplace that is becoming increasingly sophisticated," said Judith Markowitz, president of Judith Markowitz Consultants. "Certainly, error reduction is welcome, as always, but the most significant improvements are those that move Nuance Recognizer beyond pure speech recognition and into the realm of spoken language understanding. This includes semantic language modeling and other enhancements related to the handling of unconstrained speech. These are the kinds of things that the marketplace is demanding, and these are the kinds of capabilities that are part of Nuance Recognizer."

New features and technological advances of Nuance Recognizer include the following:

• Natural Language Understanding - Nuance Recognizer offers language understanding capabilities.
• Conversations - Nuance Recognizer promotes more natural interactions with callers through features such as one-step correction, implicit confirmations, mixed initiative, parsing, selective barge-in, and information-based dialogues.
• Manageability and Security -The Nuance Recognizer architecture provides a graphical management station element that allows system administrators to configure and monitor collections of speech servers. Speech servers can be accessed using network protocols to safeguard information during transmission, and speech applications now can be isolated from one another with their sensitive questions identified to prevent private caller responses from being accessed by operations staff.

Nuance Recognizer is available through Nuance's worldwide network of partners.