'There would be tremendous demand for speech recognition solutions'

Tell us about the solutions your company offers.

Nuance provides speech and imaging solutions for business and consumers
around the world. Its technologies, applications, and services make the user
experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with
information and how they create, share, and use documents. Companies are
increasingly focusing on improving the customer experience and the use of voice
recognition technology, as it is an important way to achieve this.

What exactly are your offerings for Indian market?

We have recently launched OpenSpeech Recognizer (OSR), which is a leading
speech recognition engine for telephony applications in the Hindi language,
targeted at India. We are committed to bring Hindi speech recognition to the
Indian market. The technology uses the native language of callers.Â
OpenSpeech Recognizer supports about 50 languages and dialects today and
more planned for the future. SpeakFreely feature of OSR has the capability to
determine what a caller's response means. OSR supports Unicode, which allows
Hindi applications to be constructed using the native Devanagari character set.
Prior to that, we are present in India through our speech recognition software
called Dragon, which is sold through HCL. This solution has got a good response
in India.

Which are the top verticals for you in India?

We are targeting banks, financial institutions, and railways apart from
telecom service providers.

How has been the response from Indian market, especially telecom service
providers?

We have tied up with Hutch for their 123 number and Reliance for their 1234
number. We have also tied up with BSNL, MTNL, Spice, and Tata Indicom. In
addition, we have the content provider, indiatimes, as one of our client who are
using speech technologies from Nuance to expand the access and reach of its
Internet portal. 

What is your arrangement with AIR and Indian Railways?

We have provided solution to enable their customer care phone numbers to be
responded by IVR-based voice recognition.

Who are your partners in the Indian market?

Nuance works with global and local partners to deliver its speech solutions
in this region and some of its Indian partners include Avaya, Nortel, and Wipro,
Accenture, 3D Networks, Cellebrum, Lattice Bridge from a SI point of view.

How big is the market for speech solutions in India?

I think the market is in full swing. As the telephony market grows in India,
there would be tremendous demand for speech recognition solutions. Some of the
verticals, which will really drive the market for these solutions, would be
banking and finance. This market is growing at the rate of 30% globally. The
advantage with India is that it has a huge talent pool of software developers
who can help customize these solutions. We are helping to build a developer
community who can work on various tools.

As service providers are gearing up to provide more and more value added
services, I think speech solutions will form in integral part of services
portfolio.

Who are your competitors?

Globally we compete in this space with Microsoft, IBM, and Talisma.

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in