Envox Worldwide and Phonetic Systems Enter into Strategic Alliance

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN; WESTBOROUGH, MA and BILLERICA MA - Envox Worldwide, a provider of voice-enhanced communications solutions, and Phonetic Systems, a real-time speech recognition solutions company, announced that they are entering into a strategic alliance that will include technology licensing, market and customer development, and professional services. As a result of this alliance, Envox Worldwide has integrated Envox 5, the company's open, standards-based platform for creating, deploying and managing the voice-enhanced communications solutions, with Version 5 of Phonetic Systems' Voice Search Engine (VSE), a speech recognition engine for large or highly dynamic environments. In addition, Envox Worldwide's Global Partners Network will be able to resell the VSE and its standalone applications like PhoneticOperator or DirectoryAssistant. Phonetic Systems, in turn, will be promoting Envox 5 to their service provider and enterprise customers on a global basis. The company also intends to use Envox 5 for its own ongoing application development effort. "This is a key relationship for our company. Phonetic Systems is currently providing us with some of the critical speech recognition technologies that our large service provider and enterprise customers need," said Henrik Thomé, CEO of Envox Worldwide. "We are going to work closely together to launch a comprehensive market and customer development program that is focuses on delivering outstanding price/performance to our customers. And, we'll also be exploring ways to leverage our respective professional services capabilities to accelerate and expand our activities in a number of high growth areas like Automated Directory Assistance and Alerts & Notifications." "We are delighted to announce this strategic alliance with Envox Worldwide as it is another example of how the VSE's open architecture in Version 5 allows for integration with other ASRs and leading communications development platforms like Envox 5," said John McCready, vice president of marketing and product management. "We expect the combination of Phonetic Systems' speech recognition technology and the Envox 5 platform and related services to create significant price/performance advantages for our customers on a global basis."