Telisma Unveils New Pricing Model

PARIS, FRANCE - Telisma, one of Europe's players in the field of speech technologies for telecommunications, announces its new pricing model. This partner-oriented model is based on a per-recognized-word mechanism and offers low upfront costs and unique flexibility. Why introduce a new pricing model? According to Xavier Baudouin, Telisma's product line manager, "Not only do we offer one of the best and the most economical-to-develop speech technology, but from today on, we also are very happy to propose a real "commercial breakthrough", which will make our products even more competitive. After analysis of the market and discussions with partners, we realised that regular ASR pricing models are not really adapted to the customers' needs. Often, financial officers find the initial investments in speech recognition resources too important. They don't want to take such risks. Moreover the impact of activity peaks on telephony port-based models is perceived badly, as you pay according to a maximum and not to an average usage of the system. Ticking, our new model, is a pragmatic answer to these major concerns." Ticking is a model which takes words into account : you pay for the number of words that are recognized by the system. In that sense it is by design much closer to the objective value brought by ASR than other systems. Rejected words have no impact on the price, therefore only useful words are paid for. That key feature is a real advantage. Very similar to the mobile phone standard pricing systems, Ticking offers Telisma's technological partners (integrators, IVS providers...) two options : 1) Prepaid speech processing units. As with prepaid telephone cards, the customer chooses the number of speech processing units to purchase and uses them at its own pace. By allowing to initially buy only a very small amount of speech processing units and purchase more when necessary, this system is well adapted to partners who cannot easily predict the success of one or several new voice application. 2) Annual speech processing unit capacity. As with GSM subscription, the partner buys at once an annual speech processing units capacity, according to the number of words they plan their application(s) to recognize in one year. This system well answers the need of partners dealing with relatively important consumption of words. These two options answer business needs at a given moment and over time. One can switch from one to the other or combine both. The ticking system allows to start off at a small space and to upgrade at will. "Typically, a customer whill launch a new service with prepaid speech processing units. Once the service has been running long enough to estimate its regular activity, the partner will switch to annual speech processing units capacity, which its cheaper on important volumes", predicts Xavier Baudouin. While very aware that technological innovations and quality of ergonomics are the keys for the future of speech-based services, Telisma believes this kind of new pricing approach will help businesses "go vocal".