Empirix Launches Managed Service That Evaluates Speech Applications for Contact Centers

NEW YORK - From SpeechTEK 2006, Empirix® Inc., which helps organizations adopt complex communications solutions with confidence, launched the first managed testing service that evaluates the performance of speech applications used by contact centers. Called Hammer Service Assurance for Speech, it leverages Empirix's patented Hammer testing technology to drive calls into contact centers, emulating real customers, in order to:

• Provide objective data on performance, including application availability, speech recognition rates and transaction length; 
• Identify areas for improvement, to boost user adoption rates and ensure that customers have the best possible experience; and
• Test Voice Quality to determine whether speech recognition rates are affected by poor quality - especially useful for contact centers using VoIP.

Hammer Service Assurance for Speech is a fast, easy-to-use automated testing service that is systematic and repeatable, and highly effective for isolating and resolving performance issues. The solution scales to meet different mixes of real-world call traffic and user loads. Hammer Service Assurance for Speech can test a speech application prior to an initial rollout, and can help manage speech applications in production - ensuring that they perform well even as caller and agent load on a system grows.

According to Sandra Tise, Director of Product Marketing at Empirix, this new service was driven by a rapid increase in the adoption of speech applications in contact centers. "As contact center technology infrastructures become more distributed, particularly with the increased adoption of VoIP, organizations are concerned about losing control over the quality of the customer experience," said Tise. "Proactive testing, tuning and monitoring can ensure that speech applications perform well, even under extreme caller load."

Most speech-related problems uncovered by Empirix during testing are related to load, said Tise. "An application that works and sounds fine for 10 callers may not scale well for 200 callers," she explained. "That's why load testing from the caller's perspective is so important."

Empirix offers quality assurance across the lifecycle of voice applications - from pre-deployment through live operations.

Empirix to share expertise on voice application and network testing at SpeechTEK 2006

Hammer Service Assurance for Speech is available now.  Empirix will publicly demonstrate the new service at SpeechTEK 2006 (Aug. 7-10, 2006; New York, N.Y., Booth #411).  

Empirix has also been invited to share its expertise on speech application and network testing at the conference. On August 9 at 11a.m. Eastern, Sandra Tise will present a session titled, "Avoiding the Pitfalls of Speech Application Rollouts through Testing and Production."  On August 10, Keith Byerly, Director of Product Management at Empirix, will speak at an all-day tutorial about ensuring quality in Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) environments.

For more information, or to learn more about Empirix, visit www.empirix.com, call 1-866-EMPIRIX or email info@empirix.com.

About Empirix

Empirix helps organizations adopt complex communications solutions with confidence. We combine the industry's deepest knowledge of telecommunications and self-service applications with award-winning testing and monitoring solutions to ensure our customers realize the promise of their technology investments. Empirix is the only company with expertise that spans the evolution of these advanced technologies across multiple markets - from testing in R&D labs through monitoring the end-user experience. For over a decade, thousands of quality-conscious network equipment manufacturers, service providers and enterprises worldwide have trusted Empirix to reduce the time and cost of integrating new technologies into existing environments. Visit www.empirix.com.

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Empirix, OneSight and Hammer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Empirix Inc. in the United States. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.