SRC Powers Hemscott Telephone Service

SRC (The Speech Recognition Company), has designed and implemented a speech recognition share information telephone service, open to all, launched by business information and research company, Hemscott.

Hemscott ShareSpeak allows investors to access real-time share price information from the London Stock Exchange by saying the name of the share they wish to know more about. The technology recognizes common nicknames for many companies, such as 'BT' for British Telecom, 'Marks & Sparks' for Marks and Spencer or 'Spurs' for Tottenham Hotspur.

"Hemscott ShareSpeak continues speech recognition's march into mainstream UK telephony and consolidates SRC's position as the European leader in developing and hosting mass market speech recognition applications," SRC CEO, Chris Hart, said. "By opting for speech recognition technology, Hemscott ShareSpeak is much easier to use than other telephone information services as callers only have to speak the share name rather than learn, memorize and key in numeric codes to access share information.

"Hemscott ShareSpeak is a perfect example of how speech recognition can cost-effectively deliver a valuable new service to customers while creating a new revenue stream for the business." In order to use the best performing speech recognition technology, SRC developed its own grammar to provide much greater flexibility when adding new stock names, acronyms and nicknames. This allows the system to be speech engine independent. The system has an ambiguity check built-in. If there are two shares with similar names, the caller has the ability to confirm the correct one. For example, if you say 'Atlantic', it will ask whether you mean Atlantic Caspian Resources or Atlantic Global, and all you need to do is say the full name to get the correct information. Callers are also able to interrupt or "barge in" to their next selection, meaning they can interrupt the prompts and select the next share price without having to listen to additional information such as share trade volumes if so desired.

"Hemscott ShareSpeak has already been piloted with some of our subscribers and the feedback has been extremely positive," Hemscott CTO, Stephen Roche, said. "The service was designed with usability as the priority and SRC's development and testing processes have ensured that the highest percentage of callers get what they request as quickly as possible."

All UK listed FTSE shares are covered by the service, including FTSE 100, FTSE 250, FTSE Allshare, FTSE Techmark 100, and AIM - about 2,500 companies overall. In addition to current price, Hemscott ShareSpeak also provides the bid and offer prices and volume of shares traded. End of day information is given when the market is closed. The Hemscott ShareSpeak application is hosted on SRC's carrier-grade speech hosting platform, built on Nortel Networks technology for media processing and call center environments. The SRC platform integrates Nortel Networks technology (call processing functions, switching capabilities, networking, data communications and transaction processing) with speech recognition systems. Nuance's speech recognition engine is used to recognize what the caller says.