Aculab's Prosody to Support Nuance Voice Platform

MILTON KEYNES, UK - At V-World this month, Aculab will demonstrate its Prosody digital signal processor (DSP) resource card, which is integrated with the Nuance Voice Platform (NVP). Aculab's Audio Provider is a software package that allows Nuance speech solutions to exploit the processing capabilities of Prosody. It further confirms Aculab's commitment to offer value for speech recognition technologies and the choice of operating system, with support for Windows XP/2000, Linux and Sun SPARC Solaris. The Audio Provider is a ready-to-use, host executable software module that interfaces with Aculab's Prosody card, which is used to provide telephony and speech processing features such as playback, recording, DTMF detection and echo cancellation. This allows Nuance developers to deliver complete voice access solutions without having to develop their own interface. Additional benefits can be gained from Aculab's digital network access pedigree as the Audio Provider enables a feature known as two B-channel call transfer (TBCT), also known as explicit call transfer. Aculab's Audio Provider is certified by Nuance for use with Nuance Voice Platform, having passed the full range of certification tests. This tight integration with Nuance enables project roll out to be achieved and when combined with Aculab's range of telephony protocols and approvals, worldwide customer opportunities can be addressed. Using a single Prosody DSP module with echo cancellation, the system may play prompts to, and recognize responses from 24 users while allowing barge-in. With Prosody, access can be gained to a variety of separate algorithms that may be run simultaneously on a per DSP basis, such as Group 3 fax and conferencing. Combining Nuance's natural language speech recognition technology, Say Anything, with Prosody and host based text-to-speech provides a practical mixture of technologies on a Prosody platform.