SpeechWorks was a company founded in Boston in 1994 by speech recognition pioneer
Mike Phillips and Bill O'Farrell. The Boston-based company developed and supported speech-related computer software. Originally known as Applied Language Technologies, SpeechWorks went public in 2000 and tripled its value. ScanSoft (now
Nuance Communications
Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software.
Nuance merged with its compe ...
) acquired Nuance in 2003, and changed its name to Nuance Communications.
The company's main focus was bringing
speech recognition
Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...
solutions to phone systems. Carriers and voice portals were able to use these speech-activated services to direct consumer calls, conduct transactions, and obtain information. SpeechWorks technology was uniquely suited for these applications because it was the first software that offered a human-sounding voice that asked callers questions which they could verbally answer, allowed callers to interrupt the software before it concluded reciting a list of options, and could learn from previous calls in order to add new vocabulary to its database.
These services were largely successful: SpeechWorks client
Thrifty car rentals used this service to give pricing information to callers, and 90% of surveyed customers who interacted with it expressed that the service either met or exceeded their ease of use expectations.
SpeechWorks' clients were typically in the financial services,
telecommunication
Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that fe ...
s, and travel industries, and included
FedEx
FedEx Corporation, formerly Federal Express Corporation and later FDX Corporation, is an American multinational conglomerate holding company focused on transportation, e-commerce and business services based in Memphis, Tennessee. The name "Fe ...
,
United Airlines
United Airlines, Inc. (commonly referred to as United), is a major American airline headquartered at the Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois. ,
Amtrak
The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, Trade name, doing business as Amtrak () , is the national Passenger train, passenger railroad company of the United States. It operates inter-city rail service in 46 of the 48 contiguous United Stat ...
,
Thrifty car rentals, and others. SpeechWorks also developed “multi-modal” and text-to-speech technology as early as 2001 that enabled people to use spoken commands to navigate cell phones.
Speechify Solo
Speechify Solo was a text-to-speech software released by Speechworks in 2002. Speechify Solo featured a natural, human-sounding speaking voice that could read text-based information aloud, and personalize messages for individual users. It could be applied in the fields of hand-held computing, home entertainment, and the
automotive industries.
In early 2003, the
National Weather Service
The National Weather Service (NWS) is an Government agency, agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that is tasked with providing weather forecasts, warnings of hazardous weather, and other weathe ...
implemented major voice improvements using Speechify, to be heard on
NOAA Weather Radio
NOAA Weather Radio NWR; also known as NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards is an automated 24-hour network of VHF FM weather radio stations in the United States (U.S.) that broadcast weather information directly from a nearby National Weather Serv ...
. In 2016, these were replaced by a new voice associated with a new system.
Relationship with AOL
In 2000,
America Online
AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. ...
, Inc, also known as AOL, released "AOL by Phone," a service that enabled AOL users to check their e-mail and access other AOL features through spoken commands from any telephone. This service was developed in partnership with
Quack.com
Quack.com was an early voice portal company. The domain name later was used for Quack, an iPad search application from AOL.
History
It was founded in 1998 by Steven Woods, Jeromy Carriere and Alex Quilici as a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, ba ...
, a voice portal company owned by AOL. Quack.com utilized SpeechWorks' Speechify software to power the service's voice recognition capabilities. Two years later, in 2002, AOL purchased $5 million of SpeechWorks stock, equivalent to 1% of the company.
Acquisitions
SpeechWorks purchased
Ithaca
Ithaca most commonly refers to:
*Homer's Ithaca, an island featured in Homer's ''Odyssey''
*Ithaca (island), an island in Greece, possibly Homer's Ithaca
*Ithaca, New York, a city, and home of Cornell University and Ithaca College
Ithaca, Ithaka ...
based Eloquent Technologies, Inc. in 2000 for $17 million.
See also
*
List of speech recognition software
Speech recognition software is available for many computing platforms, operating systems, use models, and software licenses. Here is a listing of such, grouped in various useful ways.
Acoustic models and speech corpus (compilation)
The following l ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Speechworks
Companies based in Massachusetts
Speech recognition