Voxeo (News - Alert) and Nu Echo have stated that they will be working together to fasten the development of speech apps using the Eclipse integrated development environment.

 

Voxeo makes unified communications and self-service applications easy to build and deploy and Nu Echo develops high performance speech recognition applications and development tools, company officials said.

 

The Eclipse integrated development environment for education is a version of Eclipse streamlined specifically for use by university and college students. The environment provides support for programming languages that are commonly used in university courses, including Java.

 

The companies have stated that they have realized that one of the harder challenges in developing a voice applications is to create the “grammar” of words and phrases used to interact with the customer and to ease that process Voxeo's VoiceObjects (News - Alert) Service Creation Environment will offered along with Nu Echo's NuGram grammar development tool.

 

Nu Echo has stated that its NuGram tools can detect and correct most of the grammar problems even before a speech app is deployed thereby saving time and money that takes to fix errors and redeploy corrected apps. Offered as an Eclipse plug-in, the tools can be easily integrated into most speech application development environments.

 

The companies have claimed that the combined and powerful features of Voxeo, VoiceObjects, and NuGram have the potential to enable the development of a whole new generation of multi-channel dialog applications in a unified way.

 

T-Mobile has certified that using the solutions offered through the collaboration of Voxeo and Nu Echo it was able to increase its productivity and quality in speech grammar development. Jan Safka, senior head of voice and mobile service at T-Mobile (News - Alert) had commented that by making use of Nu Echo’s grammar development and quality assurance tools that are integrated with the VoiceObjects products, speech-based IVR projects can now be delivered quicker and with higher and more consistent speech recognition quality.

 

Nu Echo has stated that the joining of their forces and Voxeo’s is another corner stone to provide developers with an integrated, comprehensive source to easily build and deploy unified communications and self-service applications. The availability of a free grammar development environment that transparently supports static and dynamic grammars will finally enable the grammar developer community to start sharing dynamic grammars that will be usable across recognition engines and service creation environments.

 

Voxeo had launched a new data center designed for its IVR and voice application hosting services and had expanded its European VoiceXML (News - Alert) IVR hosting capacity.