Tellme Brings World's Largest Voice Platform to the Mobile Screen; Enables Breakthrough 'Voice & Visual' User Interface for Mobile Devices
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TuVox and Viecore Named First Tellme Partners; Companies Specialize in Helping Any Business Build and Deploy Voice Applications on the Tellme Platform
SAN FRANCISCO, SpeechTEK West 2007 Conference, Feb. 22 -- Tellme Networks, Inc.®, which operates the world's largest voice platform, today announced that it has enhanced its platform with new multimodal capabilities for mobile phones allowing companies to create a visual experience that complements their existing voice services. In addition to expanding its platform capabilities, Tellme has named TuVox and Viecore as Tellme Partners. These partners can now use the Tellme Platform to help businesses create voice applications that dramatically improve their caller experience while eliminating significant costs.
Technology Innovation in the Platform
Forty million people use Tellme every month when they call a business and use their voice to find what they want, from getting a listing in directory assistance to tracking a package or buying a movie ticket. These services are built using VoiceXML 2.0, a web-based language for building voice applications that makes Internet data available over any phone. Tellme has been a leading pioneer and editor of the VoiceXML standard and has leveraged that experience to create a multimodal "voice & visual" interface, enabling users to simply say what they want and then see it on their mobile screen. Tellme will continue to work with the W3C on VoiceXML 3.0 and multimodal standards.
"For mobile phones, multimodal interfaces open up a huge opportunity to create a vastly superior user experience," said Sanjeev Agrawal, vice president of Tellme Marketing. "With this capability users can speak a command or enter text and receive interactive data that allows them to quickly find, connect or transact with a business right from their screen. Tellme's beta product for local search, Tellme by Mobile, is one of the first examples of how voice and visual come together." Anyone can visit beta.tellme.com/ to download Tellme by Mobile for free.
With these new multimodal extensions, businesses can use the Tellme Platform to enhance their voice experience with a visual interface for mobile phone users. For instance, after a customer orders a movie ticket they might see the receipt on their screen or get a confirmation text message and a map to the theater. Or, if a caller is looking to ship a package, they might ask for the nearest location and see a map and hours of operation on the screen.
Tellme Partners Deliver for Businesses Big and Small
"We believe in providing an open platform so that anyone can create applications to transform how people interact with businesses on the phone," said Jamie Bertasi, vice president of Tellme Platform Solutions. "Now, through our partners, any size business can quickly design, build and deploy world class voice applications on the Tellme Platform, saving their clients money while improving the caller's experience and driving greater customer loyalty."
For businesses interested in taking advantage of the full range of Tellme's platform capabilities, TuVox and Viecore have completed a rigorous training and certification program that enables them to design, develop and deploy world-class voice applications on the Tellme Platform. Tellme's partners also participate in Tellme's sales and marketing programs to reach new customers. The partner program makes it possible for a broader range of companies to get applications up and running on the Tellme Platform.
With this partner program Tellme is making available all of the capabilities built into the Tellme Platform, including a highly reliable nationwide network infrastructure, finely tuned speech recognition engines that process billions of utterances annually, extensive libraries of spoken grammars, millions of professionally-produced audio prompts, and around-the- clock network and application monitoring services.
About Tellme
Through innovation and design, Tellme improves how people and businesses use the phone. By combining Internet data and a voice interface, Tellme radically simplifies how people use the phone to get the information they need everyday. Today the company powers billions of calls to hundreds of phone services used by more than 40 million people every month. Some of the applications running on Tellme's platform include business search on 411, information search on 1-800-555-TELL as well as customer service and ordering for companies like Merrill Lynch, E*TRADE and American Airlines. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., Tellme's goal is to let anyone say what they want and get it, from any phone.
Source: Tellme Networks, Inc.
CONTACT:
Marci Pedrazzi
+1-408-921-6993
marci@tellme.com
Megan Dyer
+1-650-868-7043
megan@tellme.com
both of Tellme Networks, Inc.
Web site: www.tellme.com/
