Convedia Announced the Addition of ASR and TTS Features

ATLANTA, GA - Convedia Corporation, a provider of open, standards-based media processing platforms, announced the addition of advanced speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) features to its family of IP Media Servers. Convedia's speech capabilities, based on open protocols such as SIP, VoiceXML, and Media Resource Control Protocol, enable service providers and third party application developers to deliver a wide range of speech enabled services with improved cost efficiencies and greater scale than previously possible. Recent advances in speech processing algorithms are making voice control of telecommunications services a reality and have made innovative new services such as unified messaging, speech enabled dialing, and speech portals possible. However, traditional approaches to deploying speech enabled services burden general purpose servers with both speech and non-speech functions. For example, a typical solution requires VoiceXML script interpretation, DTMF processing, announcement playback, and telephony interfaces in addition to speech synthesis and speech recognition. When the processing needs of all these capabilities are combined to deliver a complete speech solution, the number of concurrent speech channels supported by even the most powerful general purpose servers rapidly declines and the price per channel climbs. Convedia's approach, however, overcomes these limitations by optimally dividing the various tasks between general purpose servers, dedicated for the speech synthesis and speech recognition function, and Convedia's highly optimized IP Media Servers dedicated to performing all the other supporting tasks. Communication between Convedia's Media Servers and the speech processing servers is accomplished through a new protocol known as Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) and is fully compatible with ASR and TTS engines from leaders such as Nuance and SpeechWorks. "By using a combination of workstations and IP Media Servers, service providers can realize improved scalability and lower costs," said Grant Henderson, Convedia's Executive Vice-President of Marketing and Strategy. "With the addition of MRCP to our long list of open media control protocols, Convedia reinforces the value and critical importance of an open, shared resource media processing platform in a next generation service architecture."