In The News

Two deployments in the transportation industry in Italy. Promptu Systems Corporation, founded in April 2000 as AgileTV, provides speech-recognition-based search and navigation services for mobile phones. The company's search technology responds to spoken search requests with results drawn from large content libraries. The product uses client software in the mobile device to send digitized voice over the data channel for processing within the network. Matteo Monteverdi, vice president, operations, Promptu, notes two major deployments of the company's solution in the transportation industry in Italy. Both applications are directed at customers of the transportation companies. The first is for Trenitalia, one of the largest rail companies in the world. Monteverdi said the adoption rate has been "tremendous," with thousands of users and growing. The second application is in the taxi industry. The application is currently being tested in Padua, Italy, and the service will be expanded to Italy, France, and Germany. The application will support over 20,000 taxis and make it easy for a customer to call one of the participating taxi companies from their cellphone.

Promptu purchases its core grammar-based speech recognition technology from an unspecified commercial software vendor. This software is then enhanced by Promptu. Promptu's enhancements and modifications are of two kinds. First, Promptu has used its audio corpus to develop custom acoustic models for selected languages and applications. Second, Promptu has modified and augmented the vendor-supplied dictionaries, correcting or adding tens of thousands of word pronunciations. The company has conducted studies that demonstrate that these proprietary enhancements can reduce the recognition system's error rate by a factor of more than two.