Unisys announces major enhancements to Natural Language Assistant, accelerates reseller program

Business Wire, April 15, 1997

BLUE BELL, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 15, 1997--

Unisys "spoken-language understanding" technology incorporated

into more and more voice-based applications

Unisys Corp. Tuesday announced the availability of release 2.0 of its Natural Language Assistant (NL Assistant) suite of products.

Unisys also announced the Natural Language Elite Software Reseller (NL ESR) partnership program, designed to accelerate the deployment of natural language understanding technology by key interactive voice response (IVR) application providers and resellers.

Significant new enhancements to the NL Assistant make it easier for developers to add natural language capabilities to existing and future applications. These enhancements include the release of the NL Toolkit and publication of a Natural Language API (applications program interface) so that developers can embed natural language functions into their own applications.

Natural language understanding goes well beyond speech recognition, providing rules-based, context-sensitive technology that enables an application to engage in "conversations" between humans and computers. Natural language understanding is distinct from speech capture in that NL Assistant captures the meaning of the sentence and translates it into actions the computer needs to take.

The NL Elite Software Reseller Program

The Unisys Natural Language Elite Software Reseller (NL ESR) program provides NL Assistant resellers with a comprehensive portfolio of innovative tools, solutions, and services to help them develop, market and sell advanced voice-based applications.

The program is structured to allow NL Elite Software Resellers and their VARs to increase application effectiveness, productivity and performance by providing a natural language interface to applications.

For the interactive voice response (IVR) marketplace, these tools and services allow a voice user interface (VUI) to be incorporated to new and existing applications.

A participant of the NL ESR program has rights to re-distribute Unisys NL Assistant suite of products and can take advantage of partner set-up services, application development services, maintenance, technical support services, and training services for sales and technical personnel. These agreements also provide sales and marketing support services.

Periphonics Corp. (Bohemia, N.Y.), MediaSoft Telecom (Mount Royal, Quebec) and Parity Development Corp. (San Francisco) are participating in the Unisys NL ESR program today.

NL Toolkit makes it simple

A key part of version 2.0 of the Unisys NL Assistant product family, the NL Toolkit simplifies the creation of natural language applications and paves the way for mass deployment. Through the NL Toolkit, developers can create natural language applications through a graphical user interface using a simple point-and-click approach.

"This is a significant breakthrough in deploying natural language applications," said Joe Yaworski, general manager.

"Previous to the NL Toolkit, applications could be created only by people highly skilled in artificial intelligence programming and computational linguistics. Now IVR vendors, application providers, and systems integrators can insert or embed a natural language interface to both new and existing applications."

IVR vendors, for example, can use the NL Toolkit to expand applications beyond the limited "0 through 9" interface supported by the telephone keypad. An intelligent voice user interface (VUI) can be used for direct navigation of an application.

Callers can speak directly to an application, rather than having to navigate a series of confusing push-button menus. This can result in shorter calls and reduce the number of calls passed through to live agents. These systems also accommodate callers with rotary dial phones.

NL API

Unisys has published the Natural Language Applications Program Interface (NL API) to provide developers with a standard interface to incorporate natural language applications running on multiple platforms and operating systems.

The NL API can run on any platform that supports C, C , or Microsoft Visual Basic. The system architecture allows for either host-resident or networked connections to one or multiple natural language applications.

The NL Assistant and the NL API have been adopted by Periphonics Corp., MediaSoft Telecom and Parity Corp.

NL Mortgage Assistant

This application provides an easy to use conversational approach for prospective mortgage clients to get real time quotes and other information. This will result in an increase number of qualified leads and closed loans per loan officer.

It relieves the loan agent of answering the mundane day to day questions and let the loan agent handle the hard questions and qualified prospects. "The system is designed to incorporate additional modules for loan qualification, and servicing in future releases," said Rick Barchard, marketing manager, Telephony Programs, Unisys Computer Systems Group.

The NL Mortgage Assistant can be deployed on interactive voice response (IVR) systems that incorporate a high end speech recognizer (which changes human voice into English text). "This application breaks the barrier of the 0-9 telephone keypad interface of traditional IVR applications," said Barchard.