Lucent and Unisys Form Alliance to Revolutionize Speech Technology

Strategic Insights -

Lucent Technologies and Unisys Corporation announced a strategic alliance on December 1, 1998, to integrate and jointly resell their industry-leading speech technology products. The partnership aims to simplify the development of natural language speech telephony applications, making them more accessible to the broader market. The integrated software package combines Lucent's text-to-speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) engines, developed by Bell Labs, with Unisys' Natural Language Speech Assistant (NLSA) Speech Assistant Toolkit. This offering enables developers to dramatically reduce development time and deploy speech-based applications faster.

Key Takeaways:

  • The Lucent-Unisys alliance formed on December 1, 1998, to integrate and jointly resell speech technology products.
  • The partnership aims to simplify the development of natural language speech telephony applications.
  • The integrated software package combines Lucent's TTS and ASR engines with Unisys' NLSA Speech Assistant Toolkit.
  • The offering enables developers to dramatically reduce development time and deploy speech-based applications faster.
  • The combined speech package will target interactive voice response (IVR) and telephony platforms.
  • Natural language speech systems replace touch-tone dial systems for applications like phone banking, expanding the potential for new self-service applications.
  • Lucent's TTS engine supports American English, German, and Mexican Spanish, with plans to add French, Castilian Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese.
  • The Lucent ASR engine supports speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition and run-time vocabulary change.
  • Unisys' NL Speech Assistant provides developers with tools for speech application design, creation, and project management.
  • Lucent and Unisys will continue to collaborate to provide pioneering developments in the speech technology market.

Statistics:

  • 32 MB of RAM required by the Lucen ASR engine
  • 166 MHz Intel Pentium Pro processor required by the Lucent ASR engine
  • The Lucent TTS engine supports male and female voices at 8 KHz and 11 KHz
  • The TTS playback includes options for adjustment of speed, volume, pitch, and vocal tract size
  • The Lucent TTS engine has logic to support accurate pronunciation of names, addresses, numbers, date and time, and context-sensitive abbreviation expansion
  • The integrated software package supports industry-leading speech technology products from Lucent and Unisys

Sources:

  • Business Wire, December 1, 1998
  • Lucent Technologies, Inc.
  • Unisys Corporation
  • http://www.bell-labs.com/project/tts
  • http://www.unisys.com
  • http://www.lucent.com