FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
VOICE SIGNAL DEPLOYS ADVANCED SPEECH RECOGNITION SOFTWARE FOR NOKIA SERIES 60 SMARTPHONE PLATFORM
Nokia Series 60 Platform Now Supports State-of-the-Art, Multilingual Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech Applications From Voice Signal
Las Vegas, Nevada - November 18, 2002 - Today in the Nokia booth at Comdex (Booth #3208), Voice Signal Technologies, the only supplier of embedded speech technology to the world’s elite mobile phone OEMs, and Nokia, the world’s largest mobile handset manufacturer, demonstrated Voice Signal’s breakthrough multilingual speech solution for Nokia’s Series 60 smartphone platform.
Voice Signal’s breakthrough multilingual product utilizes new technology that can simultaneously understand multiple languages and accents in a single system that is no larger than today’s one-language systems. Voice Signal’s new product offers handset manufacturers the opportunity to provide the highest quality speech technology in multiple languages without having to add any additional memory resources to their phones.
In addition, this new Series 60 multilingual solution provides consumers with exciting features that improve the phones usability and safety in all environments. Users can look up or dial any name from thousands of names contained in their phone book by voice in any language or accent. The system also enables users to dial numbers by voice and navigate phone menus. Moreover, since this system has both speech recognition and synthesized text-to-speech output, users can control all these features on the phone without having to use their hands or look at the phone’s display. This combination of speech recognition and text-to-speech output makes it much more convenient and safer for the consumer.
Voice Signal’s multilingual product is designed to address the reality of today’s global handset market. Mobile phone users speak multiple languages and communicate with friends and colleagues all over the world. This presents a significant challenge to handset manufacturers who, in order to remain competitive, must ship cutting edge products that incorporate state-of-the-art speech recognition and speech synthesis technology to large geographical regions. Since today’s mobile phones have limited memory and processing power, it is not possible, without adding significant resources, to ship each phone with a separate speech recognizer for each language that is spoken in a particular region.
Nokia’s Series 60 Platform is a complete smartphone software package built on top of the Symbian OS Version 6.1. The Series 60 Platform offers handset manufacturers a standardized user interface for new hardware designs, while providing a wide range of applications and communications capabilities, including multimedia messaging (MMS).
"We believe that speech recognition can dramatically improve the usability of wireless devices, enabling users to take better advantage of the tremendous capabilities contained in the new Nokia Series 60 Platform," said Stewart Sims, Voice Signal’s Executive Vice President of Marketing. "Voice Signal’s new multilingual speech technology for the Series 60 is a breakthrough that will enable the utilization of this critical technology in today’s global handset market." "Working closely with Forum Nokia has been instrumental in enabling Voice Signal to deploy this breakthrough speech solution on the Series 60 Platform," continued Sims. "With Nokia’s support we have been able to combine our multilingual speech recognition and TTS in a single system that makes it easier, safer and more fun for people to be productive with their mobile devices."
www.voicesignal.com