Lucent Technologies Inc and Unisys Corp have formed an alliance to integrate and jointly resell their speech technology products. The two say they’ll simplify the development of natural language speech telephony applications through an integrated software package designed to make speech systems more accessible to the broader market. The package, which will be sold by both companies, incorporates Lucent’s text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition (ASR) engines and Unisys’ Natural Language Speech Assistant (NLSA) toolkit – a suite of development tools and runtime components that was introduced last year. The NLSA generates the code required to allow the Lucent ASR to recognize what a person has said and turn it into text. The NLSA then interprets that text into a specific response. The idea behind the co-offering is to reduce both development and deployment time for speech-based apps, specifically in the areas of interactive voice response and telephony platforms.
