BBN HARK Systems announces client server-based speech recognition products for commercial telephony market.CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 27, 1995--BBN HARK Systems Corp., a subsidiary of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. (NYSE NYSE See: New York Stock Exchange : BBN (BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA, www.bbn.com) A consulting firm that participated in the development of some of the most extensive networks in the world, including ARPANET, which evolved into the Internet. It was founded in 1948 as a consulting service in acoustics by Dr. ), today announced three new commercial-grade speech recognition software products and applications developed for the emerging customer-focused enterprise telephony market. Customer telephony incorporates speech recognition to improve the way businesses interact with their customers over the telephone. o HARK Telephony Recognizer 3.0, the first open, client/server-based speech recognition software for a new class of customer telephony applications, for cellular and traditional wireline telephone users. HARK Telephony 3.0 is designed to enable companies to gain the business benefits of integrating voice and the computer by improving and increasing interaction both with customers and mobile employees. o HARK Developer's Toolkit A set of software routines and utilities used to help programmers write an application. For graphical interfaces, it provides the tools and libraries for creating menus, dialog boxes, fonts and icons. 3.0, a sophisticated, full-function toolkit that enables telephony application developers to quickly build a prototype of speech recognition components for customer telephony applications. This next-generation toolkit's sophisticated capabilities enable faster, more robust telephony application development and improved speech recognition support. HARK Developer's Toolkit is designed for use with HARK Telephony 3.0 announced today. o HARK Enhanced Voice Dialing Module, a module that enables cellular and traditional wireline telephone users to place telephone calls simply by speaking the name of the person or the telephone number they want to reach. Enhanced Voice Dialing provides scalable, active vocabularies that can be expanded to 2000+ words. It uses a single recognizer to deliver all application capabilities, providing an easily integrated and managed software solution. All products announced today run on the Pentium/SCO UNIX UNIX Operating system for digital computers, developed by Ken Thompson of Bell Laboratories in 1969. It was initially designed for a single user (the name was a pun on the earlier operating system Multics). and RS6000/AIX platforms, and will ship in June 1995. HARK Systems is initially targeting these products at the telecommunications, travel, finance and online services vertical markets. "Corporations want to gain leverage from their infrastructure investments to deliver smarter, more flexible services to their customers," said Julie Donahue, chief executive officer of HARK Systems. "The speech recognition products for customer telephony we are announcing today are a breakthrough in helping corporations improve customer satisfaction and increase profits, by taking advantage of the way most of us do business -- talking over the telephone -- to offer new customer-focused services." Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., BBN HARK Systems Corp. is a leading vendor of robust state-of-the-art speech recognition software. Working with its partners and resellers in the telephony market, BBN HARK Systems combines more than 20 years of speech recognition research, quality software products, and total customer commitment to provide customer services solutions. The company is a member of Dialogic di·a·log·ic also di·a·log·i·cal adj. Of, relating to, or written in dialogue. di  a·log Corporation's Signal Computing System ArchitectureTM (SCSA (Signal Computing System Architecture) An open architecture for transmitting voice and video signals. Its backbone is the SCbus, a 131 Mbps data path that provides up to 2,048 time slots, the equivalent of 1,024 two-way voice conversations at 64 Kbps. ) Automated Speech Recognition Working Group, and Microsoft Corporation's Speech API (SAPI (Speech API) A programming interface from Microsoft for speech recognition and synthesis. It provides a way for developers to enable their applications to receive text from and send text to voice devices. 1. ) Committee. -0- Editors: To receive a fax of the complete text of news releases call Brenda Nashawaty, Lois Paul & Partners, 617/860-5642. HARK is a trademark of Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. All other company names and products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. The following industry analysts have been briefed on this announcement: Tom Herman
Nancy Jamison, Dataquest, tel. 408/437-8000 Joe Outlaw, Datapro, tel. 609/764-4547 Bill Meisel, TMA TMA Turnaround Management Association TMA Texas Medical Association TMA Transportation Management Association TMA Training and Management Assistance (a component of OHRD, which is a component of OWR) TMA Tooling & Manufacturing Association Associates, tel. 818/708-0962 CONTACT: BBN HARK Systems Corp. Drew Knowland, 617/873-2810 |
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