woiSA.com (What`s on in South Africa), the entertainment and e-lifestyle portal, has awarded IntellecaVocalis a contract to develop a voice-activated restaurant guide based on the Vocalis SpeecHTML speech recognition application.
This development, one of the first of its kind in SA, will allow users to access woiSA.com`s extensive database of restaurants across the country, using any telephone. The voice-activated application is expected to go live by the middle of August.
Users will be able to search the woiSA.com guide by area or restaurant type through a voice-based interface. The guide includes content such as telephone numbers, addresses, descriptions and directions to the restaurant. The system will include an option for users to request that directions to a restaurant can be read out or sent via SMS, especially handy for users who call while driving.
WoiSA.com was launched in September last year by 21-year-old entrepreneur, Richard Smullen. The entertainment portal targets 16- to 35-year-old users with a range of lifestyle-based and entertainment listings for nightclubs, fashion, events and concerts, and a broader audience with its restaurant service offering.
The company also develops, hosts, and markets portals for a range of leading real-world brands, including 5fm`sIanF, Diesel Clothing, RingToneZone.com and, soon to be launched, 5fm`s Steve Smith and Highveld`sKevin Lee. Smullen says his company wanted to extend its reach to a market without Internet access, and give existing Internet users the ability to access restaurant content over the telephone when they are not near their PCs.
"Few companies can afford to limit themselves to offering their services over the Internet alone, especially in a country such as SA, where Internet penetration is low. We`re a new-media company, positioned to take advantage of the convergence of the Internet with traditional communication mediums such as the telephone.
"The Intelleca Vocalis solution allows us to leverage our content and extend the database that powers our Web restaurant guide to the world of telephony. This will allow us to reach a whole new audience with our content at a relatively low cost," he adds.
Intelleca Vocalis offers the Vocalis SpeecHTML solution through an application service provider (ASP) model for companies such as woiSA.com that do not want to buy the solution outright and host it on their own infrastructure. The system leverages off the existing strategy of Woisa.com: all the portal needed to do to voice-enable its content was script shadow Web pages scripted in standard HTML.
The Intelleca Vocalis gateway connects telephone calls with the woiSA.com Web site, accesses and retrieves the site data, and then supplies it to the caller after it is converted by a text-to-speech conversion engine. Customers feed information back to the Web site through an interactive, voice-based menu system.
Shaun Cochrane, GM of Intelleca Vocalis, says: "Woisa was looking at ways to extend its reach beyond the Internet. SpeecHTML allows Woisa to offer all its users a truly mobile solution.
"Vocalis has been successful in converging the Internet with any telephony device, with no requirement for special devices or configuration. SpeecHTML enables Woisa to target the rapidly growing telephony market. The key to any successful mobile solution is ease of use. SpeecHTML is as simple as dialling a telephone number and telling the service what you want."
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