Virgin Mobile's Speech Activated e-mail

Eckoh Technologies has enhanced Virgin Mobile's 4321 voice portal service with the addition of the VirginXtras Email Reader and travel content.

Virgin Mobile customers can now pick up their emails any time day or night via their mobile phone. The Email Reader allows users to listen to and reply to emails from their existing account using their mobile. It is compatible with POP3 and Hotmail accounts. Using voice commands, customers can listen, reply, delete and skip forward and backward through an email. When replying, the system records the user's voice and sends it as a MP3 file. Customers navigate their way through the portal using spoken commands. This innovative development of the 4321 service allows Virgin Mobile to extend its leading edge position providing customers with a value-added service unmatched within the mobile industry.

The introduction of this 'sticky' service will increase both one off call durations and encourage repeat usage. Priced at 20p per minute it will generate a rise in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) levels. A travel section has also been added providing news, information and access to travel services including RAC, BSM Motoring, Virgin Holidays, Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Travelstore.

Nick White, Head of VirginXtras at VirginMobile said: 'VirginXtras is all about providing our customers with useful, interactive and fun mobile services - and developing our partnership with Eckoh Technologies has allowed us to deliver another valuable and pioneering offering to our customers. The email reader continues to evolve the integrated mobile entertainment concept and provides a key differentiator for Virgin Mobile. We have every confidence that, just as with the launch of the voice portal, it will prove to be very successful.'

Nik Philpot, Chief Operating Officer of Eckoh Technologies, said: 'Virgin Mobile's decision to extend its speech-activated offering is testimony to the success of the 4321 service and the business and consumer benefits of speech recognition. Phase 1 highlighted the favourable reaction by consumers to navigation by human voice and Phase 2 presents a unique value-add which users on the move will find quick, comprehensive and convenient.'

Eckoh Technologies claim that their 'Speech Solutions' EECH SOLUTIONS is the UK market leader in the fast growth ASR recognition market. In July 2001 Speech Solutions launched Europe's first comprehensive voice portal, Eckoh, which can be accessed over the internet at www.08701101010.com or from any standard telephone - mobile or landline - by dialling one number: 08701 10 10 10. Eckoh allows the user to send and retrieve emails, go shopping, listen to the latest news, sport and entertainment, set up conference calls, check and create diary appointments, quickly connect to friends, family and colleagues - all driven by the power of his or her voice.

Speech Solutions launched the first major syndication of Eckoh with Virgin Mobile in December 2001.

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Lloyds TSB

Lloyds TSB use Speech Recognition within their automated telephone banking 'PhoneBank Express' service. This service enables customers to check their balances, obtain information relating to recent transactions, pay bills, etc over the phone, using either voice recognition or touch-tone to input their instructions.

Lloyds TSB have deployed a telephone accessible Speech Recognition system for their customers since March 1997. Starting with the second-generation Whole Word Speech Recognition Technology, Lloyds TSB moved to third-generation Phonetic Speech Recognition Technology in September 1998, which they developed in-house and in conjunction with a US supplier. Phonetic Recognition enables customers to input items such as dates and amounts in a more natural way and also the development team are able to have a quicker implementation of new words and grammars.

During a further iteration of the PhoneBank Express application in March 1999, Lloyds TSB introduced fourth-generation Natural Language Speech Recognition Technology into the service. This fourth-generation Speech Recognition Technology takes the concept of natural speech one step further, enabling customers to input some of their instructions using sentences rather than isolated words or phrases.

Lloyds TSB aim to be the pacesetters for automated telephone banking with speech recognition, and they are committed to seeking to incorporate us of latest Human Language Technologies in their service.

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The Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners

Macmillan Education have teamed up with lexicographers at Bloomsbury Publishing Plc and researchers at ITRI, University of Brighton to produce a new and from-scratch Learner's Dictionary. The dictionary incorporates ITRI's innovative corpus tools to provide the learners of English the most complete and systematic description of the way words combine.

In the lexicographic use of corpora to date, lexicographers have had to trawl through large numbers of corpus examples of a word to gain an overview of how the word behaves. Adam Kilgariff and David Tugwell at ITRI have been addressing this problem. They have developed software to produce ''word sketches': summaries of the interesting collocations and grammatical patterns a word occurs in. The word sketching software does the sorting and summarising that previously the lexicographer had to do by eye. It does it much faster and more thoroughly. The information is sourced from large corpora, and is designed to help a lexicographer produce an accurate entry for the word.

Michael Rundell, Managing Editor, highlights the advantages for the publisher of using such technologies:
"the cost of acquiring Word Sketches was offset by timesavings in the editorial process, because software pre-digested information for lexicographers and therefore streamlined the compilation process".

And so the collaboration successfully produced the Macmillan English Language Dictionary For Advanced Learners (published March 2002).

ITRI supplied the Bloomsbury/Macmillan collaboration with 7000 Word Sketches for the most frequent nouns, verbs and adjectives in English, as found in the British National Corpus. The editorial team used these automatic Word Sketches as a basis for compiling the whole dictionary, and as a particularly useful resource for compiling entries in the dictionary for the most frequent, core vocabulary.

For a more detailed version of this story, follow this link.

lastminute.com

In what the company believes is the first application of its type in the world, lastminute.com has developed an innovative service that allows people on the move to book selected hotels listed on lastminute.com's website by phone.

It is the first such consumer retail application to use both advanced speech recognition and 'text-to-speech' technologies. Customer phone calls are answered by a voice interface platform, developed and deployed by Broca Networks Ltd, where the caller's speech is converted into text, using Nuance Communications software, which is then used to search for available inventory.

The hotel offers are then spoken back to the custoemr by two voices. The first is a female broadcaster whose speech is concatenated to guide the caller, list hotels and give pricing information. The second uses rVoice speech synthesis technology from Rhetorical Systems Ltd with the 'synthetic male voice' reading descriptive information about hotels.

The original design and on-going development of the service's user interface is being assisted by a team at The University of Edinburgh's Centre for Communication Interface Research.

Robert Croen, President and CEO of Nuance Inc has said: 'Amongst enterprises that are applying voice technologies to enhance their interactions with customers, lastminute.com leads in innovation, and smart, pragmatic thinking.'

For a more detailed version of this story, follow this link.

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HSBC Bank Plc

HSBC handle hundreds of thousands of email enquiries a month, and they are enabling their email Customer Relationship Management using IBM's Text Analyzer solution. IBM's text mining product is embedded in CRM software supplied by IBM Business Partner, Amacis Inc, who provide a service to help companies route and respond to electronic communications as accurately, quickly and comprehensively as possible.

HSBC wanted to solicit open-ended e-mail feedback from its customers and determine whether categorization could help it communicate with customers effectively. "In the end it came down to technology", comments John Rendle, Internet services manager at HSBC. "The Amacis solution, including IBM Text Analyzer, was truly scalable and a good fit for our architecture." Even in a non-structured environment, in which the bank wasnot able to predict what categories of content it would receive, Text Analyser was able to categorize more than 40% of documents and suggest appropriate repsonses.

In the next phase, as HSBC opens its e-channels to more structured communications based on its new Internet banking facility, the banking firm expects that Amacis Visibility with Text Analyser will be able to correctly categorize 80% of its incoming e-mails and Web-based forms. "We now know that we will be able to handle hundreds of thousands of e-mails per month with a staff of approximately 35 people. In other words, Amacis and Text Analyser make it feasible for us to open a customer communication channel for all forms of retail banking," says Rendle.

For the full case study, go to http://www.research.ibm.com/dssgrp/amacisandibm.pdf