PIKA Technologies and SpeechWorks Deliver Speech Technology to Telephony Developers

OTTAWA, CANADA - PIKA Technologies Inc., a manufacturer of hardware and software subsystems for telephony developers, announced a marketing agreement with SpeechWorks (Nasdaq: SPWX), a developer of speech recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies and services, to help telephony developers bring speech-driven solutions to market. As a result, telephony developers will benefit from SpeechWorks 6.5 speech recognition engine and PIKA Technologies' high-quality voice cards. The partnership presents a complementary approach to serving telephony developers. PIKA voice cards deliver low latency, full duplex audio streaming and feature echo cancellation, optimized buffer sizes, pre-speech buffering, barge-in and voice activity detection (VAD). The digital and analog cards stream the clean audio to SpeechWorks speech recognition engine for processing speech. The speech recognition engine interprets the content of the buffers, and responds back to the application. "We are pleased to partner with PIKA Technologies. Through this partnership, telephony developers will gain access to PIKA Technologies' award-winning enabling technology to accelerate time to market for network-based speech applications," said Steve Chambers, chief marketing officer at SpeechWorks. "Partnering with the worldwide leader in speech recognition allows us to better serve the developer community," said Terry Atwood, Vice President Sales, Marketing and Customer Care, PIKA Technologies. "We've joined forces with SpeechWorks to ensure developers will benefit from the scalability, reliability and quality of our two company's products as they develop next-generation, speech-driven applications."