September 2007

Magazine Features

The 2007 Implementation Awards

In our first installment of the Speech Industry Implementation Awards, we recognize companies that have garnered impressive results from their recent speech technology deployments. In addition to financial returns, this year's winners also recognized soft returns—such as productivity gains, improved efficiencies, and better customer satisfaction scores—from their speech technology deployments.

The 2007 Market Leaders

The speech technology industry has matured to a point where prominent leaders have emerged from the pack. To recognize these companies for their trailblazing efforts, we've assembled our first annual installment of the Speech Market Leader Awards. These awards feature four vendors in five speech technology categories (speech engine, self-service suite, analytics, professional services, and speech security).

The 2007 Speech Luminaries

Selecting this year's winners for the Speech Luminaries awards was no easy task. We received nominations for candidates in the areas of research and development, speech science, systems engineering, system implementation, and corporate and organizational leadership. All of these individuals have had a hand in advancing the causes of their respective companies and the industry as a whole, and worked tirelessly to increase awareness and acceptance of speech technologies during the past 12 months.

The 2007 Star Performers

Over the last 12 months there have been several standout speech technology vendors that have contributed to the industry's growth. Theircontributions can come in many forms—a promising product or service launch, a heightened company-wide focus on speech technology through alliances or mergers and acquisitions, or exceptional execution of an existing product or service.

Editor's Letter

A Defining Moment

Forward Thinking

Speaker Authentication: Exploding Some of the Myths

Speaker authentication is still so new that many misunderstandings and myths abound.

Human Factor

The Characters You Meet in VUI Design

Working effectively with the other personas can lead to a smoother sales pitch and buy-in process.

A View from AVIOS

A New Read on Digital Talking Books

Speech technologies and new XML standards enhance access to educational texts.

Voice Value

Speech Technology with Impact

With CallWave, I can see what you're saying.

Speech Solutions

Machine Translation

Whether embedded in a piece of hardware or as software that can be installed on a laptop computer or PDA,applications that rely on speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies and language databases canprovide instantaneous translation of key words and phrases.

FYI

ASR Technologies Seen as Key to Growth in the IVR Market

With about 90 percent saturation in the large enterprise segment, vendors in the North American interactive voice response (IVR) market are looking to small- and mid-sized businesses for future growth opportunities, according to a research report from Frost & Sullivan.

CIOs Clamoring to Adopt VoIP, But Not Without Hesitation

A recent survey of chief information officers by IDG Research Services shows increasing adoption of IP telephony. The survey, sponsored by Interactive Intelligence, found that 63 percent of respondents intend to deploy an IP PBX within the next 12 months, an increase from the 50 percent who currently use such a system.

New Patent Claims Priority in NLP Development

Parus Interactive, a provider of speech-enabled unified communications software solutions, received a Notice of Allowance from the U.S. Patent Office July 19 for a patent covering natural language processing (NLP) technologies.

Strong Growth Expected for UC and IP Contact Centers

With the growth of offshore call centers and ever-increasing modes of personal communication, unified communications (UC) has filled a niche for businesses with disparate locations, and people who rely on a combination of voice, email, and text messaging to stay up to date and in touch. From both operational and business aspects, vendors have marketed unified communications toward companies wishing to increase productivity and save money.