IVR

Considering that speech is the most natural form of expression and a method of communication around the world, and different dialects and speech environments pose unique challenges, the world needs to find a way to automate speech recognition. AppTek, a leader in human language technology, announced the availability of its automated speech recognition engine for Spanish. The new, enhanced ASR engine has additional features that can process several other key languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Chinese.

It is compatible for use with machine translation, and commercial customers and the U.S. government are provided with a complete solution through AppTek's GSA (News - Alert) schedule – at no cost.

What is unique about The PlainSpeech Spanish telephony engine is that it has basically been targeted at unscripted natural language, colloquial speech, noise and other aspects of non-broadcast environments.

With its fast, accurate, and reliable speech recognition ability, AppTek's ASR technology has been deployed for use in several commercial and government applications with considerable success. It seamlessly integrates with its own hybrid MT software and the end result is excellent transcription and translation, the company said.

The flexibility of the ASR technology allows it to be modified to adapt itself to changing needs and demands on domain specific vocabulary fields.

"The benefits of the enhanced ASR engine go beyond traditional uses, as we are able to provide customers the industry's first solution to employ Spanish transcription and translation in one platform, Hassan Sawaf, chief scientist at AppTek, said.

Sawaf added that as this could be used for many leading-edge machine translation and multilingual information retrieval projects, including media monitoring. There could be no doubt of its worth in many sectors of industry.

AppTek, headquartered in McLean, VA, is a developer of human language technology products with a complete suite for text and speech processing and recognition. The company also leads major research and development efforts to further the advancement in the field of developing better methods and technologies in the field of Human Language Technology.

In a related news release, AppTek announced the release of Chinese for its hybrid machine translation system. This is part of AppTek’s migration of its supported languages to its patent-pending Hybrid Machine Translation platform, while continuing to introduce new languages throughout the year.