Metaphor Technology Breaks Barrier to Natural Dialogs in Computer Telephony Interfaces.Business/Technology Editors Marketing Partnership with VoiceGenie Speeds Metaphor's Market Distribution and Deployment Metaphor Technology, Inc. a leading-edge provider of full-service computer speech solutions, today announced the introduction of its Metaphor product and service, which provides the most flexible and most natural automated dialogs in the industry. Using patented natural language technology, Metaphor develops dialogs that mimic real conversations by allowing users to interrupt or re-orient scripts at any time, with any relevant question or statement. Metaphor even accommodates users who change their minds in the middle of a script. A joint marketing partnership was also announced with VoiceGenie Technologies Inc., the worldwide leader in VoiceXML Gateway Solutions, Development Environments, and Tools. This agreement will facilitate and speed Metaphor's distribution and deployment of its products and services in the computer telephony See CTI, VoIP and IP telephony. Computer Telephony - Computer Telephone Integration market. "Today the computer telephony industry successfully uses dialogs that direct people through scripts for applications like getting spoken email and getting stock quotes," said Michael Kuperstein, Founder and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of Metaphor Technology, Inc. "More complex applications in product ordering, travel reservations, and problem resolution are very difficult or impossible to do with `directed dialog', because people often want to re-orient the dialog outside the script to ask questions or change their minds. As a result, they get stuck or frustrated frus·trate tr.v. frus·trat·ed, frus·trat·ing, frus·trates 1. a. To prevent from accomplishing a purpose or fulfilling a desire; thwart: . Metaphor breaks this barrier by mimicking the dialog structure of how people naturally talk to each other. Now call centers and other businesses can increase their rates of automated call completion for existing applications as well as implement speech solutions for more complex applications." "Metaphor's dialog solution is a natural complement to VoiceGenie's speech platforms," said Stuart Berkowitz, President and CEO of VoiceGenie. "Our combined solutions usher in Verb 1. usher in - be a precursor of; "The fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in the post-Cold War period" inaugurate, introduce commence, lead off, start, begin - set in motion, cause to start; "The U.S. the next generation of computer speech applications with better service quality and higher rates of call completion, while providing a faster time-to-market and less expensive integration for our customers." As an example of a frustrating frus·trate tr.v. frus·trat·ed, frus·trat·ing, frus·trates 1. a. To prevent from accomplishing a purpose or fulfilling a desire; thwart: call using only `directed dialog', suppose someone called a computer agent on the phone to trade stocks. In the middle of the dialog, the computer agent might say, "How many shares of IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) do you want to sell?" A person might respond with, "How is my portfolio performing this month?" Since the computer agent only expects a number of shares, it would simply repeat its question, thereby frustrating the person. With Metaphor, the computer agent understands the person's question, answers it, and then asks if the person wants to continue with trading stocks. With this type of flexibility, customers will have a better service experience and the call center, handling the call, will have a higher rate of call completions than is possible with touch-tone and other computer speech solutions. Call center labor costs will decrease as automation increases. Customers can either use Metaphor Technology services to develop and implement the total speech application for call centers or use the Metaphor product, with training, to do it themselves. Besides telephony applications for call centers, the next versions of Metaphor will also be used for intelligent interfaces for games, home robots, and e-learning. These interfaces will enrich the interactive experience and allow people to get more done much faster. Although Metaphor generates industry standard VoiceXML and SALT code, the developer never writes code in these languages. Instead, Metaphor uses a powerful new development environment with embedded Inserted into. See embedded system. handling of dialog context and knowledge inference. As a result, dialogs are developed at a fraction of the time and expense it takes using standard dialog development tools using VoiceXML. This translates to reduced costs and faster times for call centers to get their speech applications into production. About Metaphor Technology, Inc. Metaphor Technology, Inc. provides the most natural and flexible dialog solutions for computer speech applications in the industry. The Company was founded by Dr. Michael Kuperstein in 2001 with the goal of making computers communicate better with people, based on how the brain processes and learns language patterns and sequences. Dr. Kuperstein, who got his Ph.D. at MIT MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology , was voted one of the most influential e-commerce leaders in New England New England, name applied to the region comprising six states of the NE United States—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The region is thought to have been so named by Capt. in 2001 by the Massachusetts Electronic Commerce Association. The Metaphor concepts and technology have emerged over the years from Dr. Kuperstein's work on his 11 patents, including the first "Neural Robot" that learns from its own experience, through his publication of many journal articles and a book, and through three previous companies he founded in handwriting recognition Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive intelligible handwritten input. The image of the written text may be sensed "off line" from a piece of paper by optical scanning (optical character recognition). , facial recognition Noun 1. facial recognition - biometric identification by scanning a person's face and matching it against a library of known faces; "they used face recognition to spot known terrorists" automatic face recognition, face recognition , and biometric Web services (1) Loosely, any online service delivered over the Web. Such usage appears in articles from non-technical sources, but not in IT-oriented publications, because definition #2 below describes the correct use of the term. . More information on Metaphor Technology can be found at www.metaphortech.com. About VoiceGenie VoiceGenie is the worldwide leader in VoiceXML Gateways, Development Environments, and Tools. Each day, deployed VoiceGenie infrastructure answers over one million calls. The VoiceGenie VoiceXML Gateway -- first to offer 100% VoiceXML 1.0 and 2.0 compliance and first with support for multiple speech- and text-to-speech engines -- allows any phone to access Voice Web applications developed using VoiceXML. VoiceGenie's customers and partners comprise many leading organizations, including AT&T, France Telecom, SAP, Lucent, Intel, SpeechWorks, Nuance nu·ance n. 1. A subtle or slight degree of difference, as in meaning, feeling, or tone; a gradation. 2. Expression or appreciation of subtle shades of meaning, feeling, or tone: , Oracle, Eli Lilly Eli Lilly can refer to:
TMC Texas Medical Center (Houston, TX) TMC Traffic Message Channel TMC The Movie Channel TMC Traffic Management Center Labs. For more information, please visit www.voicegenie.com. All trademarks and registered trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners. |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion