Intelleca Labs lays foundation for SA's speech technology future

Intelleca, South Africa's leading provider of speech and voice self-service automation technology, has laid the foundation for the future of speech technology in South Africa with a five-year investment in Intelleca Labs.

Intelleca Labs, headed up by services manager John Madden, has been responsible for a number of breakthrough developments and made a fundamental contribution to the field of speech technology in this country.

It is the first comprehensive laboratory of its kind, giving Intelleca and its clients depth and breadth of technology underpinning their speech investments.

"We formed Intelleca Labs to give ourselves a facility for research and development, so as to ensure our customers are optimising their systems, and to maintain our competitive-edge," says Madden. "We have invested more than five years of intellectual capital in the labs, in the process helping Intelleca become the market leader."

The Labs' greatest success to date has been the South African acoustic model, which has provided the foundation for a range of speech solutions. Intelleca's team of engineers worked intensely to train the Nuance speech application by transcribing hundreds of thousands of utterances, first in English and then in other languages. They used these utterances, along with South African grammars, to build a comprehensive repository against which callers' speech could be referenced.

"This has given us the ability to understand the vast majority of words uttered by South Africans and build next-generation applications which depend on the spoken word, rather than just 'yes' or 'no'," adds Madden. "As Intelleca has evolved, so we have developed the ability to provide acoustic models and grammars for vertical market sectors, such as financial services. We have laid a foundation of intellectual capital, with a vast repository of words and grammars."

While English, as the universal language of business in South Africa, was the first language to have an acoustic model, Afrikaans, isiZulu, and seSotho are all undergoing or have completed development. Intelleca Labs partnered with the government-backed Meraka Advanced Institute for Information & Communication Technology to give effect to its development of acoustic models for various official languages.

Alongside the speech optimisation and acoustic models, Intelleca Labs also runs test harnesses, where it runs comprehensive tests for speaker verification (voice biometrics), and acid tests for acoustic models.

"We can now run a set of predefined tests against a sample of speech data," says Madden. "When we launch a new speech system, we can run the call recordings against the acid tests, giving us a quick, succinct view of how an application is working. We can then run the appropriate tests to rectify and optimise the application."

Another major success for Intelleca Labs has been the ability to develop individual personae for clients, telephone-based personae which accurately reflect and extend the brand of each individual client. So it is that clients such as Airports Company, SAA and Multichoice have their own persona on their customer self-service applications.

"The customer touchpoint is made up of two components," says Madden. "One is implicit, due to the structure of the underlying call flow. The other is explicit because of the voice they are hearing: based on the brand concerned, they expect a specific tone, speed of delivery and matching voice persona.

"We initiate a persona design session where we identify key components of a customer's brand and embody those in a voice matched to brand, and hire the right voice artist. Once they are in studio, we ensure they match the requirements and provide the ongoing management to completed project."

A further service developed by the labs is that of continuous improvement, a programme offered to customers as a post-launch service.

"In terms of this programme, we delve into our customers' applications and perform proactive analysis, including qualitative and quantitative data on how their applications are performing: the volume of calls, percentage capacity, and actual performance at each decision point. We make recommendations, and the client makes the changes accordingly."

"Creating an R&D facility such as this is an enormously costly and time-intensive exercise, but given our commitment to speech technology, it forms a critical component of our overall delivery to customers," says Mike Renzon, CEO of Intelleca. "Our principals, Nuance and VoiceGenie, have been invaluable in supporting Intelleca's market leadership."