Bill Scholz' group at Unisys (Blue Bell, PA) has announced a Natural Language Speech Assistant, or spoken language application development suite. It includes development tools and runtime components for interactive telephone voice systems based on speaker-independent recognition technology from AT&T, L&H, or Nuance. (Large-vocabulary continuous speech recognizers such as Dragon Systems' NaturallySpeaking and IBM ViaVoice may also be usable, in about three years.) Unisys' NLSA helps with writing BNF grammars, to the extent that new developers can start writing applications within a single day. Unisys has business ties to almost a dozen resellers and NL developers for this technology. . [, 14Oct97.] ("The new Unisys IVR call developer gets speech recognition off the ground with a PhD-free environment.")

-- Ken