Unisys Unveils Natural Language Speech Assistant Program; Product Suite Adds New Speech Recognition Deployment and Interpretation Environment

Business Wire, Oct 1, 1997

BLUE BELL, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 1, 1997--Unisys Corp.'s Computer Systems Group Wednesday announced the Natural Language Speech Assistant (NLSA), an advanced, open speech recognition development and interpretation environment.

The NLSA, part of the Unisys Natural Language Understanding suite of products, provides interactive voice response (IVR) developers with a complete suite of tools for speech application creation, project management, development methodology, testing. It includes an automatically created runtime speech interpreter to determine the meaning of a caller's spoken requests.

NSLA provides IVR vendors and application developers speech recognizer independence and application portability for their speech-based applications.

"There is nothing else like it," said Rex Stringham, president of Enterprise Integrations Group, an IVR developer. "The architecture is very elegant and easy to integrate with any IVR. The Unisys Natural Language Group's expertise with speech recognition in combination with their natural language capabilities is unique. We look forward to working with them in moving automatic speech recognition into the mainstream of IVR applications."

"We have been using a beta version of the NL Speech Assistant and it performs as advertised. We already are developing applications for some of our major clients," said Terry Stuck, vice president of Voice Processing Plus. "The architecture that Unisys has developed makes it easy for us to offer speech applications to all of our clients."

Two key attributes to the Unisys NLSA provide an environment for developers to easily create speech applications across a number of different speech recognition platforms. These features are designed to significantly reduce the total development time, simplify the development process and accelerate the deployment of speech recognition applications.

-- The Speech Assistant Toolkit (SAT) Windows NT GUI environment, providing a friendly point-and-click approach with the option of creating a speech application with any BNF grammar based recognizer.

-- The Speech Assistant Interpreter (SAI) -- deciphers the meaning of text generated from a speech recognizer.

"In the last year, automatic speech recognition has reached a point that it can now be deployed," said Joe Yaworski, general manager of the NL Assistant program, Unisys CSG. "However, we saw that deployments were slow, expensive, and lacked standards, creating bottlenecks in the IVR channel. The NL Speech Assistant addresses all of these areas and more. Our environment allows IVR developers to learn speech application development skills in less than one day."

The NLSA provides an environment where the developer's speech application is not tied to any one large vocabulary, grammar-based speech recognizer or platform. The applications created can be used across multiple automatic speech recognizers and IVR platforms, all accessed through an easy pull-down menu.

"The new Unisys IVR call developer provides a runway to get speech recognition off the ground by creating a PhD-free environment," said Nancy Jamison, principal analyst at Dataquest. "The IVR call flow developer which provides speech as well as touch-tone application development makes it easier to incorporate speech technologies into IVR applications.

"Unisys has paid attention to a market need while at the same time utilizing its core competencies of systems integration and development tool creation."

Today the NL Speech Assistant can automatically create BNF grammars for AT&T's Watson, Lernout and Hauspie, and Nuance Communications speech recognizers.

Other partners that have joined the Elite Reseller program and have adopted the NL Assistant approach include Periphonics Corp. (Bohemia, N.Y.), MediaSoft Telecom (Quebec), Parity Software (Sausalito, Calif.), Pronexus (Carp, Canada), IPAT Corp. (Cincinnati) and Cortina Entertainment (Hollywood, Calif.).

NL Solution providers include Destiny Software (Conshohocken, Pa.), Enterprise Integration Group (San Ramon, Calif.), Management Computer Services, (Minneapolis), and Computer Instruments (Overland Park, Kan.).

For more information about NLSA or the Unisys Enterprise NT Natural Language Understanding Program, visit the Unisys web site at www.unisys/marketplace/nlu .

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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. Access the CSG home page on the World Wide Web -- http://www.unisys.com/marketplace -- for further information.

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