Vocalis Group Plc has finally crawled into profitability after giving shareholders a rough ride since the company, a management buyout from Logica Plc, was floated in 1996. Last year’s 1.8m pound loss – a factor in the former chief executive officer’s decision to pursue other interests – has been replaced by a meager 32,000 pound profit. The most impressive point in the figures in the jump in revenues from 2m pounds to 6.2m pounds. Speech recognition companies can do no wrong at the moment and most of group’s revenues came from its Speechtel range of products. Vocalis is confident that it can benefit from growing demand for speech recognition-based telephony applications. It plans to increase the number of applications on offer and is looking at ways to combine Internet Protocol IP telephony with its existing platforms and applications. One way of pushing up revenues under investigation is to license its speech technology to other developers and systems integrators. In the short term, the company should enjoy considerable growth but there has to be doubts as to whether a company of its size can survive independently in a market where competition will be fierce.
