Unisys Natural Language Speech Assistant 3.0 Speeds Deployment of Speech-based Applications; Supports Multiple Languages.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 27, 1998--

New dialog design and testing function can cut months off the development of speech-based telephone applications

Unisys Corp. Monday announced the Natural Language (NL) Speech Assistant Version 3.0, with new features that now enable developers to design and test drive a spoken language application without programming.

The new NL Speech Assistant 3.0 Dialog Design Assistant (DDA) module, which includes a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) simulator, allows developers to rapidly prototype a spoken-language application, validate its "listen-and-feel" with a real-world test, and make changes - all before writing a line of code, or even before choosing a speech recognizer.

Unisys and the NL Speech Assistant 3.0 have significantly reduced the risk of building and deploying speech-based applications.

"This tool would have saved us months of development time on some of our earlier speech-based projects," said Darin Kalland, project manager at VMS Inc., an interactive voice response (IVR) development house located in Edina, Minn. "With the NL Speech Assistant, we will be able to design, test and rework the application design over and over, without any coding at all. In previous projects, we had to write the code, test it, and then edit the code. This will cut our design development time by two-thirds."

In addition to helping design and validate the dialog, the NL Speech Assistant uses a WYSIWYG interface for developing speech recognizer grammars and also automatically creates the speech interpreter needed to transform the runtime output of a speech recognizer into something a computer can understand.

"Building a dialog is one of the trickiest parts of designing a speech-based application," said Robert D. Newman, chairman of Planetary Motion, provider of the CoolMail e-mail by phone service in Glencoe, Ill. "The Unisys NL Speech Assistant helps greatly with the creative process, and its speech-recognizer independence also allows us to leverage our work across multiple platforms."

Other new features of NL Speech Assistant 3.0 include compliance with the Microsoft Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI), manipulation of infinitely repeated variables, automatic dictionary file output, complete management of audio prompts, and support for multiple languages, including French and German.

The Emerging Industry Standard

"Our tools are now licensed by over 40% of the IVR vendors offering large-vocabulary speech recognition, with more joining with us all the time," said Rick Barchard, director of the Natural Language program at Unisys. "The new features we are announcing in version 3.0 of the NL Speech Assistant have the potential to significantly advance the adoption of speech-based applications."

The Unisys NL Speech Assistant approach to spoken language development is recognized as an emerging standard in the marketplace. Partners that have adopted the NL Assistant approach include Periphonics Corp. (Bohemia, N.Y.), MediaSoft Telecom (Quebec), Parity Software (Sausalito, Calif.), Pronexus (Carp, Canada), IPAT Corporation (Cincinnati), and Lernout & Hauspie (Burlington, Mass.).

Structured Approach to Design

The Unisys DDA is a structured tool for quickly and easily designing speech-enabled applications. Designers type in the application prompts and the expected responses for each prompt. The DDA walks the designer through the different turns of dialog creation, so that the result is a complete and well-structured spoken-language system design.

As a by-product of DDA input, NL Speech Assistant produces a functional design document in Microsoft Word format. This can then be shown to the end customer for review or given to an application developer for coding. The Unisys DDA also automatically produces a formatted script of the prompts for studio recording artists.

Off to See the Wizard

Once the dialog flow is defined, the Dialog Design Assistant's new WOZ simulation function enables the designer to conduct an automated "Wizard of Oz" test. Such tests play an important part in developing a spoken language application.

Typically, these are done by having a person read a script live with all the prompts (hence the reference to the Wizard of Oz, who bellowed "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" in the 1939 MGM movie). With the Unisys WOZ simulator tool, this process is automated.

The person acting as the "wizard" uses the design produced by the DDA to automate the test. Designers can either record prompts in a .WAV file, or they can use the in-built text-to-speech function. The wizard listens to live customer calls with a headset and manages the dialog by selecting the appropriate automated prompts based on the caller's responses.

During the test calls, the DDA automatically records all the caller responses. These can be used for testing and tuning of the various speech recognizers being considered for the application and for developing the grammars with the Speech Assistant Toolkit module of the NL Speech Assistant in later stages of application development.

Once the dialog design has been thoroughly tested and given full approval by the client, the developer then (and only then) begins writing the speech-enabled application using the Speech Assistant Toolkit. The NL Speech Assistant won a product of the year award from Call Center Magazine because it has made the development of speech-enabled applications so easy.

The addition of Dialog Design Assistant with the WOZ simulation makes the design and development process not only easy, but fast, flexible, and affordable.

Availability

The NL Speech Assistant 3.0 will be available in August through Unisys NL Enabled partners such as Parity, Periphonics, Mediasoft, IPAT, Pronexus. Per-seat developer's licenses for NL Speech Assistant 3.0 begin at $3,725.

About the NL Speech Assistant

The Natural Language (NL) Speech Assistant is an advanced speech application development tool set that is platform- and speech recognizer-independent.

As part of the Unisys Natural Language Understanding suite of products, NL Speech Assistant provides application developers not only with the tools for speech application creation but also for application project management, development methodology, and testing.

Through NL Speech Assistant, developers have a standard tool to create spoken language applications across platforms and speech recognizers, protecting their applications from obsolescence. Unisys has a complete reseller program for the NL Speech Assistant, including platform integration, marketing and sales support, technical support and training.

Visit http://www.unisys.com/marketplace/nlu for more information.

About Unisys

Unisys is an information technology solutions provider that has a portfolio of information services, technologies and third-party alliances needed to help clients capitalize on their information asset to enhance their competitiveness and responsiveness to customers.

Unisys expertise is founded on the strengths of three global businesses: Information Services, providing consulting, application solutions, systems integration and outsourcing; Computer Systems, providing industry-leading technologies; and Global Customer Services, delivering comprehensive services and products supporting distributed computing environments.

Access the Unisys home page on the World Wide Web -- http://www.unisys.com -- for further information.

Unisys is a registered trademark of Unisys Corp. All other brands and products reference herein are acknowledged to be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

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