Telephonetics Unveils ContactPortal - a New Speech Recognition System for the Corporate Market

HEMEL HEMPSTEAD,UK -- A new speech recognition platform that offers call screening and mobile working has been unveiled by Telephonetics. Aimed at the corporate market, ContactPortal uses advanced speech recognition technology to answer, transfer and make telephone calls, and allows staff to filter out calls from people they'd rather not speak to and to forward calls to employees wherever they're working. "When someone rings in, the ContactPortal asks who they'd like to speak to and then asks who is calling," says Paul Welham, sales and marketing director of Telephonetics. "The system then tells the person being contacted who is on the line. That person can then choose to take the call or transfer it to a secretary or even voicemail, so that it can be dealt with at a more convenient time." Telephonetics' ContactPortal also incorporates a mobility feature allowing employees to have their calls forwarded to them wherever they have access to a phone - i.e. in their car, another office or even at home. "This is obviously ideal for people on the road - and an important safety aid for employees who have to make calls while they're on the move," explains Paul Welham. Telephonetics' new ContactPortal ensures all calls are answered promptly 24 hours a day, seven days a week at a fraction of the cost of an operator providing this service. Based on Telephonetics' COPs technology, combining the functionality of a Corporate Operator and secretary into a "Contact Manager", ContactPortal uses digital signal processing (DSP) and text to speech resources from Aculab with core speech recognition software from Nuance. Using industry standard information technology, it can be integrated with any make of PBX, using DPNSS or QSig digital protocols. ContactPortal also integrates with existing features such as least cost routing, route optimisation and call-barring, and will work with existing voicemail and pager systems thus protecting a company's investment in its existing systems. ContactPortal allows users to make changes to the system without the need for complex programming and can be administered securely via a Web-based package and a unique telephone user interface. Another benefit of the system is that it does away with the need for internal phone directories. Instead, a company's phone numbers/extensions are held securely in the system database.