Edify Announces New Version of Edify 8.5

SANTA CLARA, CA - Edify® Corporation, an S1 company and a provider of voice and speech solutions, announced that it will be rolling out the voice and speech enhanced version of its multi-channel platform, Edify 8.5 at SpeechTEK 2003. Developed to meet the evolving requirements of voice and speech self-service, Edify 8.5 underscores Edify's focus on providing customers around the globe with the ability to design, build and deploy the very latest voice and speech solutions. "Edify's 8.5 release provides users with the most extensive set of speech and text-to-speech resources available as well as very broad standards support," said Mark Plakias, senior analyst at The Zelos Group. With the release of Edify 8.5, customers in financial services, travel, transportation, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications and other key global markets will have a significant number of new features in order to deploy successful automation solutions. For instance, Verizon (NYSE : VZ), an early adopter of Edify 8.5, now has the potential to support a wide range of standards and specifications therefore, eliminating concern over application functionality and compatibility issues. "Verizon is continually looking for ways to more effectively automate and improve speech-based operations for its enterprise business customers," said Mark Kayserman, executive director development at Verizon. "Working with Edify and its partners such as BBN we see the potential to leverage its voice and speech applications to greatly enhance our interaction systems." Edify 8.5 provides full integration support for ScanSoft's SpeechPearl XML 1.0 and BBN's HARK speech recognition engine. BBN HARK is a full-featured, large vocabulary speech engine and provides Edify customers with another established alternative for their speech solutions. "As the first platform in North America to support ScanSoft's SpeechPearl XML, we are delivering seamless access to a proven, standards based speech engine that is built to leverage standards like Voice XML and SALT," said Ted Bray, director of product marketing at Edify. "In addition to its extensive standards support, SpeechPearl XML also supports 46 languages, providing Edify customers with a truly global solution to their speech recognition needs. We are making it easy and less expensive to enhance functionality and extend standards support for speech solutions." To learn about Edify 8.5 new features visit them at SpeechTEK Booth #711. Edify 8.5 is available now. The BBN Hark and ScanSoft SpeechPearl XML 1.0 speech recognition integrations ship late October.