India Times Selects Nuance Communications Speech Recognition With Support for Hindi

BURLINGTON, Mass. & NEW DEHLI, India - Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) deployed speech solutions for India's telecom service providers, including Airtel, BSNL, Hutch, MTNL, Spice, Reliance and Tata Indicom. In addition, a regional content provider, India Times, selected speech technologies from Nuance to expand the access and reach of its Internet portal.

The subscriber base for telephony services in India, which added 35 million new subscribers over the past year, is expected to reach 250 million subscribers by the end of 2007. Nuance is offering OpenSpeech Recognizer (OSR), its speech recognition engine for telephony applications, with support for the Hindi language.

The addition of Hindi complements previously available OSR support for the Indian dialect of English. These two languages can now be used together to build bilingual applications.

"We launched Indiatimes Voice in July 2004, and have surpassed 1.7 million minutes per month, giving us great encouragement," said Sukanta Dey, director, telecom, India Times Limited. "Based on the speed of its growing popularity - demonstrated by a monthly increase of 30 percent in the first two years - it seems we're well on the way to becoming the largest and most widely used speech-based service in all of India."

OSR determines what callers say, allowing self-service telephony applications to interact with callers using speech. Through its SpeakFreely® feature it can even determine what a caller's response means, enabling the next generation of advanced conversational applications. OSR supports Unicode throughout, allowing Hindi applications to be constructed using the native Devanagari character set.

Nuance works with global and local partners to deliver its speech solutions in India. Partners include Avaya, Genesys and Nortel as well as local system integrators like OnMobile, Cellebrum, 3D Networks, Estel, Servion and Lattice Bridge and others.