Montreal manufacturer not threatened by AT&T’s entry into speech recognition

AT&T Corp's recent announcement that it's investing in voice-recognition company SpeechWorks International does not worry a Montreal firm in the same field. In fact, Mark Lowe, market relations manager of Locus Dialogue Inc, says he welcomes the challenge. "Their activities will be in the business-to-consumer market segment and we don't play in that sandbox at all," he explained to Network Letter. "We focus on the business-to-business market segment." From its founding in February 1996, Locus Dialogue has produced a device that permits callers to reach a person merely by saying the name or position. The company's Liaison system was first launched three and a half years ago. Over 250 systems are deployed in North America and in Europe, primarily in France. The company has also moved into Mexico, and plans are underway to expand its European sales beyond the French border. Liaison is a turnkey solution that can be assembled, shipped and installed in a few days. A company purchasing Liaison from one of Locus Dialogue's distributors will name a system administrator who is given a brief training course by Locus and who then runs the portal independently. Another Locus product, called Soft Dialogue, requires more cooperation between the manufacturer and the client, since it develops a tailor-made solution. Lowe says the system, which costs at least $6,000, is flexible. "A very small system could run as little as two telephony ports, meaning two simultaneous calls and as few as 100 entries. Typically an entry is a person's name or a department name or something like that," he notes. "On the other end of the scale you can go up to 32 ports, 32 simultaneous calls coming in and 50,000 entries. Theoretically after that you can bundle systems together and provide multiples of 50,000 and multiples of 32. We've never actually had a real life deployment that's on that scale but technologically there's no reason we couldn't pursue that strategy." Locus is about to embark on its second major financing round, with an announcement expected by the end of the summer. The previous round, in February 1998, brought in investors Thomas Cantwell and Associates, Sofinov société financière d'innovation, GTI Capital, Innovatech du Grand Montréal and Le Fonds de Solidarité des Travailleurs du Québec. The company's headquarters and manufacturing facilities are located in Montreal, with regional sales offices in four American cities. The company president splits his time between Quebec and California, where the VP of sales is based. The firm does not sell directly to clients, but uses a network of sales partners. Bell Canada distributes its products in Canada and its minority shareholder Ameritech handles Liaison in the U.S. Smaller companies such as Toronto-based Accord and MultiNet of Montreal are also distributors. When a Liaison system is first deployed, it has a successful recognition rate of about 85 per cent. As people become acclimatized to the portal and as adjustments are made, that rate climbs to the mid-90 per cent range. Although perfection can never be achieved, Lowe says the system does have other advantages. "It really does function regardless of individual tonality, regional, gender, anything like that," he says, noting one ironic hitch. "And as far as the kind of phonetic complexity of a name, it actually turns out the more elaborate a name is to spell and pronounce, the easier it is to guarantee successful routing." The move by AT&T mystifies the Locus Dialogue people, who point out that the giant telco is returning to a field it had abandoned earlier. It has also invested in Tellme.com, one of SpeechWorks' competitors. Lowe suggests that the re-entry by the American company will help to introduce voice-recognition products to the public at large. "It's not a competitive threat directly," Lowe says, "and if anything you could even argue that it's good news because it's just going to make more and more people out there in society aware. They will almost certainly have a very positive experience with the technology and in the long run, or even the mid run I suppose, that's good news for us."

Montreal manufacturer not threatened by AT&T’s entry into speech recognition

News | 06/19/2000 4:00 am EDT

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