County of San Mateo Chooses Syntellect
PHOENIX - Syntellect Inc., a division of Enghouse Systems Limited (TSX: ESL), announced that the human services agency of the county of San Mateo has contracted with Syntellect to design and deploy a speech-enabled self-service healthcare solution for its newly formed health insurance telecenter. This represents the county's desire to implement an open standards solution that can support basic speech recognition today and provide a bridge to more advanced natural language speech solutions in the future. The county of San Mateo provides health services, social services, criminal justice and law enforcement services, as well as a wide variety of other services, to a population of approximately 737,000 residents in northern California.
"Because the County's Human Services Agency caseload has increased by 68 percent over the last 5 years, and because levels of funding did not allow for an increase in staff relative to the increase in caseload volume, we made the decision to provide services to our over 23,000 recipient families via a telecenter environment," said Kathryn Ciamarro, Director of Automation at the County of San Mateo - Human Services Agency. Employing a full range of self-service technologies, including speech recognition, text-to-speech, and CTI—all powered by Vista—the telecenter is expected to provide HSA recipient families with quicker response times, improved quality of service and consistency of information. "We chose Syntellect for three important reasons," said Ciamarro. "First, Syntellect is a demonstrated leader in the industry, particularly regarding speech implementations. Secondly, the solution uses open, standards-based hardware and software and so readily fits into our overall IT architecture plan. Finally, Syntellect demonstrated a consultative approach that we believe will help us create an optimal system now, as well as one that can be expanded to include more advanced self-service capabilities in the future."