Unisys and Parity Software offer natural language understanding in an IVR Toolkit

Business Wire, March 3, 1997

SAUSALITO, Calif. and BLUE BELL, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 3, 1997--Parity Software and Unisys Computer Systems Group Monday announced an alliance to provide natural language technology solutions for companies looking to automate their call processing applications through intelligent, cost-effective and time saving methods.

This collaborative effort continues the growth and market adoption of the natural language understanding technology from Unisys.

This relationship establishes Parity Software as a NL Elite Software Reseller, allowing Parity Software to embed the NL Assistant into Parity's Software's CallSuite products in order to sell the technology to third parties or end users.

"The Unisys NL Assistant is a perfect complement to the CallSuite telephony products that Parity Software has to offer," said Laura McCabe, VP, Sales & Marketing, Parity Software. "The addition of Natural Language Understanding technology to Parity Software's platform will increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs. Now, callers can get through services faster with NLU, reducing the length of the call."

Parity Software's tools make it quick and easy to add computer telephony capabilities to your development environment. Natural Language enhancements to these tools position these products on the leading edge of telephony application development.

Parity Software is architecturally compatible with the Unisys NLU product, making this an ideal solution for customers looking to save time and money.

"Parity Software is the world's leading supplier of software tools to computer telephony system integrators, VARs, consultants and developers," said Joe Yaworski, general manager, Unisys Natural Language Understanding Group.

"Parity Software delivers a sophisticated set of software tools that integrate IVR application development and voice recognition. Now, natural language understanding will allow Parity Software users to deliver the recognition and understanding of complete sentences. This will keep the Parity Software solution at the top of the industry."

What is Natural Language?

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.

The NL Assistant applies over 400 English grammar rules to a knowledge base of over 112,000 English language entries, and translates the utterance into meaning. New telephony applications can now be built to understand a natural conversation.

The result is increased customer satisfaction through a more natural user interface, as well as shorter calls which deliver cost savings to clients implementing these systems.

How It Works

This solution is a combination of speech recognition and natural language understanding. For example, if you call your bank today for information about your account, an automated attendant will prompt you to press #1 for checking, #2 for savings, and #3 to transfer funds.

With a natural language solution, you can tell the system "I'd like to check my savings account balance" or, "checking account please" or, "savings account balance." The speech recognizer takes what is said, digitizes it and turns it into a sentence.

Unisys NL Assistant interprets the sentence through semantic parsing and selects out the nouns, pronouns and verbs to apply meaning. The intelligence of the natural language engine can detect the difference between "What's my checking account balance?" and "I want to check my savings balance." and provide the correct information.

About Parity Software

Parity Software Development Corporation is an acknowledged leader in the computer telephony industry and recipient of numerous Editor's Choice and Best of Show awards.

Parity was founded in 1989 with a clear purpose in mind: to provide development tools that could help people build call processing applications more quickly and easily than with traditional programming languages. Company offices are located in San Francisco, with site offices in Copenhagen, Denmark and Melbourne, Australia.

Parity has distributor relationships in many countries around the globe, and a strong worldwide customer base made up of Fortune 500 companies, national banks, telephone companies, software developers, systems integrators, and value-added resellers.

The Unisys Computer Systems Group

The Computer Systems Group (CSG) is the Unisys technology business. Unisys CSG has extensive experience in designing and developing technology for high-volume transaction processing and in integrating diverse technologies into heterogeneous enterprise environments.

CSG works with its customers, Unisys services groups, and independent marketing and sales channels to help them better serve their clients.

Unisys -- The Information Management Company

Unisys is one of a select group of companies with the portfolio of services, technologies and third party alliances needed to deliver the benefits of information management -- helping clients use their information asset to enhance their competitiveness and responsiveness to customers.