PIKA Technologies and Voice Robots Partner to Deliver Speech Automation Applications

OTTAWA, CANADA - voice robots, a speech middleware developer, selected PIKA Technologies' quad span digital interface voice cards to enable speech automation applications. PIKA Technologies is a manufacturer of hardware and software subsystems for telephony developers. voice robot's robot 5 is a platform used for a variety of applications. This platform enables development of speech recognition and speech synthesis applications by way of a structured graphical interface. These applications are deployed in call centers, conference call management, teleworking, chat lines and similar applications. PIKA PrimeNet quad span MM PCI voice card gives robot 5 up to 480 channels of telephony in one chassis. Coupled with 512 simultaneous half duplex connections per card, that can be made between any of the 4096 CT bus timeslots, makes for massive scalability. voice robots is already planning to scale the single chassis capacity to 960 channels in the next release. The robot 5 middleware allows developers to specify grammars for speech recognition, which can be combined with prompts to form the dialog and used with text-to-speech. robot 5 works with many of the popular speech recognizer engines like Nuance, SpeechWorks and Philips. An example of a speech automated application robot 5 created is one designed for Germany's leading daily newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Frankfurter Allgemeine created voice-enabled portions of their news and information. Users dial a set number from anywhere and voice-browse the portal. If the user wants to hear about the current sports scores, all they need to say is, "Sports." Users can also voice-browse information on news, politics, economy, culture, people, nature and technology, investor, stocks, weather, television, Olympics, and more. "When researching voice card vendors, PIKA Technologies stood above the rest," said Lewis Graham, CEO of voice robots. "Their PrimeNet MM quad voice card provides our robot 5 with a flexible platform and a very open system for individuals to use. Not only did PIKA Technologies deliver exceptional technical support to us, we are able to get more capacity at a lower price." "Many companies will benefit from robot 5's easy-to-use interface when building their application," said Terry Atwood, Vice President Sales, Marketing and Customer Care, PIKA Technologies. "Speech recognition is an application that is growing in demand. Companies are realizing the benefits of making their voice systems more user-friendly. We look forward to voice robots' success."