Baycare Health System Selects Phonetic for Dynamic Voice Access; Release of Version 5.0 Voice Search Engine

BEDFORD, MA - Phonetic Systems announced that Florida-based BayCare Health System implemented the PhoneticOperator Global Enterprise Administration solution to voice-enable the company's 35,000 directory listings across nine hospitals. Phonetic Systems' solution allows BayCare to connect any of its 16,000 resident and visiting employees, regardless of their location, by speaking their name. Phonetic Systems' solution is designed specifically for voice searching large directories of five thousand to more than 5,000,000 records. Phonetic Systems' solution also provides the management flexibility and scalability needed to control dynamic and frequent updates due to staff turnover and location changes. These characteristics have also prompted BayCare to begin exploring the potential for Phonetic Systems' solution to scale to manage other critical connectivity tasks. These future tasks could include emergency routing to cell phones and beepers, and the task of managing inbound patient communications - while still maintaining the highest levels of confidentiality and privacy. "In the two years that BayCare spent evaluating various speech systems, Phonetic Systems was the only company that didn't flinch when we told them how large our directory was. They promised that they could easily voice-enable 35,000 records and that they would deliver firm installation parameters without the need for custom engineering or constant speech tuning," said Dan Duncan, regional project manager at BayCare Health System. "We are thrilled with the results and are looking forward to finding new ways to use PhoneticOperator throughout the hospital system." Phonetic Systems' Global Enterprise Administration enables BayCare Health System to create one master directory for all locations and then automatically propagate the directory for use in any other location. The administration and automatic updates can be done remotely, it also avoids the rebuilding of vocabularies that are often necessary to affect directory changes in other solutions. "For a speech solution to be truly effective in critical situations, it must be able to grow and change in lock step with an organization," said John McCready, vice president marketing and product management at Phonetic Systems. "No more evident is this than in a healthcare setting. Phonetic Systems has addressed this need, providing organizations with the ability to leverage speech as a critical tool - regardless if it's for rapid, emergency connectivity or simply for competitive advantage." Release of Version 5.0 Voice Search EngineBEDFORD, MA - Phonetic Systems announced a major upgrade to its core technology platform which forms the foundation for its PhoneticOperator and DirectoryAssistant products. The company currently supports 10,500,000 unique directory listings and over 225,000,000 calls per year across its live deployments. Version 5.0 of Phonetic Systems' Voice Search Engine enables extensibility and performance in providing voice access to directory-based applications. These applications include automated carrier directory assistance, enterprise call routing, virtual credit card, conferencing, emergency broadcast messaging, paging and security systems; as well as call center applications such as secure voice access, password reset, business continuity coordination and information retrieval. Kelsey Group's Mark Plakias, senior vice president of the Communications and Infrastructure Group, commented, "Voice recognition technologies have been consistently delivering paybacks of less than a year in a growing number of applications. While a number of vendors have proven it at the enterprise level, the ultimate test for voice recognition is massive carrier directory assistance applications. We see Phonetic Systems as a leader in these high-volume situations, and Version 5.0 as a very relevant platform for the carrier community." With Version 5.0 the core Phonetic Systems technology platform offers four major enhancements: -Scalability - Version 5.0 can search more than 5,500,000 directory listings and over 1,000,000 grammar sizes in a single server before needing to subdivide. By keeping directories in a single server, customers gain dramatically increased accuracy and overall system success while they lower total cost of ownership by reducing the integration and administration.
-Carrier Grade - Version 5.0 offers increased reliability, scalability and the robustness required for carrier deployments. DirectoryAssistant and PhoneticOperator move from a single platform implementation to a modular, distributed approach which sits like an ecosystem and automates the transfer of voice and data between the database, switch and workstation. Version 5.0 also delivers improved automated analysis and logging tools for ensuring accuracy and supports VXML 2.0 and is SNMP compliant.
-Improved Speech Recognition and Accuracy - PhoneticOperator and DirectoryAssistant provide increased accuracy in identifying intended contacts and completing calls regardless of connection and environmental factors from analog, digital, wireless and/or VoIP interfaces. Version 5.0 also improves proactive data tuning and filtering to boost search performance. -Open API - Opening up the API to Version 5.0 allows third party vendors such as software and hardware platform providers to integrate with Phonetic Systems solutions. This provides greater ability to customize the product and achieve even greater levels of carrier grade redundancy and scalability. "Voice-enabled applications are becoming the difference between profit and loss for hundreds of companies in the enterprise and carrier markets," said JD Howard, president and chief executive officer of Phonetic Systems. "Enhancements to PhoneticOperator and DirectoryAssistant reflect our commitment to helping our customers slash operating expenses, make productivity skyrocket, and stop the competition."