Philips and Celforce Launch Speech Enabled Voice Portal

Philips and Celforce, a Hutchison affiliate and cellular services provider in Gujarat, have announced the launch of Voice Recognition, a speech-enabled voice portal, for Gujarat. The voice portal uses SpeechPearl, a speech recognition and understanding software for telephony systems developed by Philips Speech Processing, a business unit of Royal Philips Electronics and a supplier of speech recognition technology and business solutions. Gujarat’s voice portal is the continuation of a series of voice portal services of Hutch (the unified brand name of Hutchinson) in India featuring speech recognition technology from Philips. With the launch of Gujarat’s new voice portal, Hutch now offers its more than one million mobile customers in India access to a wide range of information and entertainment services by mobile phone and navigable just by voice. Other areas where this service has been deployed include Delhi, Kolkata, Andhra Pradesh, Chennai and Karnataka. 

The Celforce Voice Recognition service provides callers with the latest updates on news, stocks and shares, and sport, as well as entertainment including movies, and even horoscopes. Celforce’s customers need only dial 333 from their mobile phones and state their choice. The system recognizes the caller’s voice commands and immediately responds with the requested information. Callers can choose to skip from one service to the other just by saying what they want. The intelligent system recognizes the commands and responses accordingly. By saying “help” the caller receives assistance on navigation instantly. The service is also personalised, meaning that once the caller chooses to hear the news in a certain language or asks for the horoscope according to his or her zodiac sign, the system will remember it each time the caller calls. Philips’ SpeechPearl speech recognition engine was deployed for the Voice Recognition voice portals in co-operation with India’s Computer Telephony Private Ltd (CTPL), a system integrator and a Philips’ partner. SpeechPearl’s natural language understanding technology enables callers to speak naturally in their own words without special training, commands or instructions, just like speaking with a real human agent. The system is designed to understand voices, dialects and accents from all over India.