Elix, Nu Echo and CONCEPT S2i Unveil Holiday Application

MONTREAL, QUEBEC - Elix has partnered with Nu Echo and CONCEPT S2i to build an application for the holiday season. This application, which runs on Elix's IVR (Interactive Voice Response) platform and is accessible at www.talktosantaclaus.com, allows anyone to invite a child or a child at heart to have a personalized interaction with Santa and his automated elf, Pixel. To personalize the chat, parents or other adults use the Web to provide some general information about the child. The application is generated a solution that uses the Web, speech recognition, text-to-speech and the VoiceXML standard. "In today's competitive environment, with its limited customer loyalty, no business can have the same monopoly of clients that Santa enjoys," said François Rodrigue, president and CEO of Elix. "Elix understands the challenges facing businesses and uses its contact center expertise to implement solutions that can help companies not only better manage their customer interactions, but also create value for the enterprise and their most important asset, their customers." "Voice technologies such as speech recognition and text-to-speech have been refined and improved and have matured to the point where they are now increasingly used in a wide range of commercial applications," said Yves Normandin, president of N Echo. "This amusing application was designed to give an idea of the sort of services companies can now offer their customers." "We are now experiencing the convergence of telephony and the Web," said Jocelyn Couture, president of Concept S2i. "This experience of combining expertise to create an innovative solution that bridges the gap between the Web and telephony has been intense, instructive, and, above all, fun."