Telisma and CatchWorld Partner on South African ASR

CatchWord and telisma are collaborating to co-develop languages that can be used with the teliSpeech Recognizer for the southern African market. Today, they announced their collaboration on South-African English and Afrikaans, with more regional languages to follow.

Southern Africa’s linguistic variety is a true challenge for voice services access, as it gathers at least 11 official languages within the region. The collaboration between telisma and CatchWord will offer those mobile subscribers the option to use their own language to access services, information, knowledge, and entertainment.

telisma and CatchWord have used telisma’s collaborative approach to the design and development of industrial speech processing solutions, based on the open Eclipse development environment. Both the South African English and Afrikaans languages are being developed by CatchWord using the teliSpeech Language Development Kit (LDK) and will soon be available with the teliSpeech Recognizer, telisma’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) software.

"We approached CatchWord to start the talks of collaboration in the spirit of telisma’s open strategy. Conscious of our unrivalled joint expertise in the development of speech technologies and solutions in Southern Africa, this alliance will help accelerate the availability of ASR in more southern African countries, such as Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique," stated Eric Le Flour, cofounder and vice president of strategy and business development at telisma.

CatchWord Managing Director Justus Roux explained that this partnership is aligned with his company’s strategy to work closely with technology providers to conceptualize and develop technologies and tools to enable human-centric computer interactions. "We are confident the open collaboration with telisma on the technical and commercial levels, combined with our expertise, enables us to offer leading edge speech processing solutions that best meet the needs of Southern African customers and support their growth. The jointly developed product will also further reinforce CatchWord as a leading provider of speech technologies in the region," he said.