MCLEAN, Va. - SunRocket, an Internet phone service provider, selected Angel.com to build and host its voice-automated sales and member services phone application.
TEMPE, Ariz. - Excell Services' Voice Automation Service for Directory Assistance has been deployed for three years.
MILTON KEYNES, U.K. - Aculab launched a media resource control protocol (MRCP) client for use with its Prosody media processing resource product range and IP telephony PCI card.
MATAWAN, N.J. - Camtronics Medical Systems has installed a Speech Enabled Auto Attendant from SpeechSwitch, Inc.
ALAMEDA, Calif. - Voxify Automated Agents will soon begin handling contact center calls for Red Lion Hotels, the flagship hotel brand for Red Lion Hotel Corporation.
From Ping Wales - Entertainment UK selected Oritor to launch its new services offering 24-hour access to stock and delivery information, using voice applications.
BASKING RIDGE, N.J. - Avaya signed a strategic alliance agreement with SAP America, Inc., to market Intelligent Communications-enabled business applications that bring together people and business processes.
From LEGALIT - ScanSoft and Nuance have closed their merger - a deal that aims to create a dominant player in the speech technology industry.
BASKING RIDGE, N.J. - Interstar Technologies, a developer of fax capabilities for Internet protocol (IP) telephony networks, has been selected for membership in the Avaya DeveloperConnection program.
Edify released the Edify Voice Interaction Platform Release 9.5 with enhanced support for hardware- and software-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The new release supports speech recognition engines.
Diaphonics has appointed John Gibbons as vice president, sales.
SALEM, N.H. - MacSpeech released a new ScriptPak for Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 as well as a new ScriptPak for iTunes version 6.
Sioux Falls, S.D., School District released the first year results of its pilot program, which is designed to improve test scores.
JOLIET, Ill. & PITTSBURGH - Premier Assistive Technology released a universal learning device based on MP3 hardware.
TURIN, Italy, and DUBLIN, Ireland - Loquendo's multilingual synthetic speech and automatic speech recognition engines are now integrated with the Voxpilot Open Media Platform v2.5.
PALO ALTO, Calif. - The Las Cruces, New Mexico School Administration has expanded its investment in Learning Systems Group technology.
ATLANTA - Nexidia formed a media business unit in order to address audio-video search and content management using Nexidia's core phonetic search technology. Nexidia also announced that former Good Technology and Yahoo! executive, Drew Lanham, has joined the Nexidia executive team.
SAN ANTONIO, Texas and BEDMINSTER, New Jersey - The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has cleared the merger of SBC Communications Inc. and AT&T after a review of the merger's potential impact on the market, requiring that the combined company permit competitors access to facilities in certain specified commercial buildings across the SBC 13-state region.
NEEDHAM, Mass. - Brooktrout Technology, Inc. released new products in its TR1000 voice processing board family that are telephony platforms that meet the European Union Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive.
BURLINGTON, Mass. - Nightingale, a provider of ASP-based solutions to Canadian health care providers, has selected Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical to enable speech recognition within its Nightingale electronic medical records (EMR) solutions.
Braintree District Council has implemented the Telephonetics ContactPortal as part of its "Customer First" program.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Federal Communications Commission approved two major telecommunications mergers.
BURLINGTON, Mass. - Nuance Communications, Inc., formerly ScanSoft, Inc., named the winners of its annual Best Practices Competition, awarded at its annual conference, Conversations 2005.
Nabaztag, WordQ, MagneticTime.com and Mobile Speak Pocket selected Acapela's speech solutions.
SALEM, N.H. - MacSpeech appointed Softline UK as a new distributor for their speech recognition products for Mac OS X.
WESTBOROUGH, Mass. - Envox Worldwide's CT Application Development Environment (Envox CT ADE™) has been chosen by Selectron Technologies to power its IVR and call center management solutions.
DALLAS & ATLANTA - Intervoice, Inc. signed an agreement to purchase Edify Corporation from S1 Corporation, Edify's parent company.
Frost & Sullivan named Convergys the recipient of its 2005 Award for Technology Innovation in the field of voice recognition technologies.
SYDNEY and PHOENIX - Sydney-based company, Holly Connects, managed services and large enterprises, expanded to North America.
BEDFORD, Mass. - Kurzweil Educational Systems, Inc. named the winners of its second annual Kurzweil Educational Systems Kurzweil 3000 Software Awards. Kurzweil Educational Systems Also Joins National Center for Learning Disabilities in Recognizing Educator for Excellence in Classroom
BERLIN - Volt Information Sciences agreed to acquire Varetis Solutions from Varetis AG for approximately 21 million euro ($24.8 million).
Lab9 Solutions has released a new wireless handset application powered by Sensory's FluentSoft speech technology engine.
According to Amit Desai, vice president of products and co-founder of Voxify, "Clearly, the shorter the time it takes to get an application up and running, the better it will be for the bottom line, but speed should not compromise quality of service. Wyndham found that the right choice is one that maximizes customer satisfaction for simple and complex types of calls alike, but can be deployed swiftly and painlessly."
CINCINNATI - Convergys Corporation partnered with ClickFox, Inc.
Mark Rayburn has started a new speech company called DemandVoice, a standards-based IVR hosting service provider focused on operations, customer service, partnerships, and technology.
ATLANTA, Ga. - Nexidia released its UK English language model for audio search, retrieval and analysis.
Sam Waicberg joined Envox Worldwide as vice president of sales for the Americas where he will be responsible for developing and implementing the overall sales strategy for the company. In addition, Tony Lenox accepted a new position as vice president of worldwide customer service & support.
SAN JOSE, Calif. - NCT released its ClearSpeech noise reduction technology for Enea's OSEck real-time operating system.
BURLINGTON, Mass. and GHENT, Belgium - Discovery Health, MultiChoice, MTN Banking and Airports Company SA in South Africa selected Nuance Communications, Inc. and Intelleca Voice & Mobile, a South African provider of voice solutions to provide their speech recognition solutions.
LONDON - EDF Energy launched a speech recognition service for customers wanting to provide meter readings and pay their energy bills.
Holland's Ministry of Justice passed a new law encouraging the deployment of biometric speaker verification technology, provided by Persay Ltd., to monitor 'hooligans' banned from attending soccer games.
CINCINNATI - Time Warner Cable expanded its software licensing agreement with Convergys Corporation.
PITTSBURGH - AumTech, Inc. incorporated AT&T Natural Voices Server from Wizzard Software into their Carrier Grade Advanced Telephony Environment (CGATE) VoiceXML Platform.
TriAxis, a provider of voice, data, and cable television triple play services to master planned communities and condominiums, has selected Carrius Technologies' Compleat-200 Service Delivery Gateway as its services gateway.
SALEM, N.H. - MacSpeech released a series of new additions to its speech recognition product line.
TURIN, Italy and GIRARDEAU, USA - Showcase Technologies, a developer of real estate marketing products, has selected Loquendo text-to-speech (TTS) technology to enhance the company's online real estate viewing experience.
From Globe and Mail - According to Matthew Ingram, "Both Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. have launched search engines for sound and video, but they are in their early stages. A small Toronto startup called SimonSays Voice Technologies Inc. believes that it has the solution to indexing sound and video easily: A speech recognition engine it says is second to none."
PITTSBURGH - The Swiss Library for the Blind and Visually Impaired (SBS) has selected AT&T Natural Voices from Wizzard Software to power their talking catalog.
From PBS National Public Radio (NPR) - NPR's Neva Grant chaperones two phone-automated voices on a "date."
SHEFFIELD, U.K. - XoVox Communications Ltd. released their latest version of XCommunicator, version 5.
ALAMEDA, Calif.— Jack Longinotti has joined Voxify as VP of finance and CFO.
BEDFORD, Mass. - Empirix Inc. released the results of a survey conducted at the recent Annual Call Center Exhibition (ACCE) conference on call center technology and management.
LONDON and NEW YORK - Carlson Leisure Travel Services (CLTS), a division of Carlson Leisure Group (CLG), has deployed a Fluency speech recognition IVR application.
MUNICH and ZURICH - linguatec GmbH entered a strategic partnership with Swiss text-to-speech specialist SVOX AG.
LOS GATOS, Calif. - Channel Access LLC signed a distribution agreement with PIKA Technologies.
WESTBOROUGH, Mass. - Envox Worldwide entered into new sales and support agreements with value-added distributors (VADs) throughout the world.
NCT's ClearSpeech Voice Recognition Enhancer product has passed the Texas Instruments DSP Algorithm Compliance Tests for TI's C55x architecture and has been accepted into TI's eXpressDSP program.
MONACO, and EDISON, N.J. - MAP Telecom and Kirusa partnered to bring Kirusa's Voice SMS application to mobile operators in the Middle East and North Africa.
PITTSBURGH - ProCAT has chosen Wizzard Software and IBM's ViaVoice Speech Recognition (ASR) Software Development Kit (SDK) and runtimes for their WinnerVR real time transcription software.
Marvin Yanof has joined Vicorp as VP of Sales Americas.
Nancy Jamison, principal analyst at Jamison Consulting, explains, "Avaya Voice Portal 3.0 enables IT staff to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by re-using existing software components and applications, and is architected to take advantage of industry standards…Avaya Dialog Designer 3.0 [is] an Eclipse-based application development tool that allows designers to more easily and efficiently create new speech applications."
PITTSBURGH - Houghton Mifflin Company has licensed AT&T Natural Voices for Server as the Spanish voice behind their reference book, The American Heritage® Spanish Dictionary.
Viecore moved and expanded to a new corporate headquarters in Mahwah, N.J.
RA'ANANA, Israel - The Philadelphia Police Department (PD) has selected NICE to capture and analyze its emergency communications.