During our meeting at SpeechTEK last year, one of the things I asked CEO Yves Normandin was expansion plans. Nu Echo is a highly respected speech technology company based out of Canada and has a talented team of folks that eat and breathe VoiceXML, TTS, VUI, ASR, etc., but the company definitely has room to grow in the U.S. market.

Normandin ended our meeting with a hint of “stay tuned” regarding my question. On Monday, March 21, I got my answer:

Nu Echo, the speech application company that delivers exceptional user experience and task completion rates, and Loquendo, the global speech technology company, today announced the launch of their new partnership, enabling the companies to offer North American customers speech application development, dialog design, porting and tuning services to complement Loquendo’s existing portfolio of highest quality multilingual technologies, for a simpler yet more effective and enhanced integration of speech.

This partnership reinforces the ongoing expansion of Loquendo’s North American presence. Partnering with such an expertise-rich company as Nu Echo will see significant advantage for enterprises in the contact center and speech-enabled application space. It will expand the service level for Loquendo’s partners in the U.S. and Canada, to include VoiceXML application development, grammar development for advanced speech recognition, dialogue and VUI design, TTS and ASR tuning, and so on.

Furthermore, thanks to this partnership, new Loquendo customers can now quickly and seamlessly migrate their existing speech-enabled applications, from the simplest to the most complex, and exploit the full benefits of Loquendo speech technologies, while safeguarding previous investments.

“Loquendo’s rapid North American expansion is creating a very strong and much-needed alternative in the speech technologies market,” said Yves Normandin, Chief Executive Officer of Nu Echo. “We have worked closely with Loquendo over the past 18 months and we have been highly impressed not only by the performance of their technologies, but also by the responsiveness and the quality of their customer support organization.”

“Nu Echo is one of the leading speech companies in the U.S. and Canadian markets, with a team of highly skilled personnel building on twenty years’ experience and proven expertise in the speech application development and professional services fields,” said Daniele Sereno, Vice President, Product Engineering of Loquendo. “Their ability to respond rapidly and effectively to customer requests, along with their unparalleled commitment and dedication to their work, means they are a choice partner to assist Loquendo in supporting our North American clients and partners.”

 

It appears Montreal-based Nu Echo has been quite busy since last summer when I caught up with CEO Yves Normandin. The Canadian company, mostly known for its IVR design and speech application expertise, continues to leverage and build upon its highly robust NuBot Automated IVR Testing Platform in the cloud. Its latest service offering is called Mirador IVR Application Monitoring, a fully automated service to periodically call into an IVR app — DTMF or speech — to determine if there are any problems.

The service has the usual features commonly found in other monitoring solutions: email (or SMS) notification, scheduling, and reporting. But Nu Echo sweetens the deal with Mirador by offering a 60-day free, no strings attached trial by just signing up on its website. No upfront cost, no new hardware, no new software — not a bad deal for cost conscious companies these days.

It’s a much more elegant monitoring solution than designating a poor soul to dial the IVR every morning before he (or she) drives to the office. (Believe me, I have known companies that did this…)

Check out the press release:

Montreal, QC (PRWEB) February 8, 2011

Nu Echo, creator of the NuBot Automated IVR Testing Platform, is introducing Mirador, an IVR Monitoring Service that makes sure your speech or Touch-Tone IVR systems are up and running and provide the user experience you expect.

Mirador continuously calls your IVR applications at regular intervals and simulates callers going through various application transactions, providing real-time notifications of performance degradations or system failures, as well as periodic reports detailing the system’s performance over time. Because this is all done remotely from our hosted platform, there is nothing to install at the IVR premises and there is no need to modify the IVR applications.

Using the NuBot Automated IVR Testing Platform as its core foundation, the Mirador Service provides an IVR monitoring solution that goes beyond the simple detection and reporting of outages. Indeed, Mirador features a rich set of report metrics that highlight performance degradation of the monitored IVR systems. These not only include call setup failures and unexpected response delays but also transaction failures or unusual call durations. This is important since the fact that a system responds to call does not necessarily imply that all of its functions are working correctly.

Today’s IVR systems often involve complex, distributed architectures with multiple components (toll-free providers, telephony interfaces, networks, databases, back-end interfaces, etc), any of which is subject to failures and/or degradation. The only reliable way of verifying that the systems as a whole perform as expected is by relying on continuous end-to-end monitoring. This is exactly what Mirador does when it places calls to the monitored system and goes through various application transactions in order to verify that it performs as expected.

One of the ways in which Mirador distinguishes itself from less sophisticated IVR monitoring solutions is its use of advanced speech recognition technology to recognize and understand prompts played by the IVR system. This enables it to closely simulate a human going through various application paths and detect problems that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Sam Aparicio, CEO of Ringio, says: “Mirador’s ability to detect even minor degradations is very important because it makes it possible to take prompt action upon notification and therefore avoid that a small problem degrades into a much more serious one if nothing is done.”

After receiving alarms, users can review call detail records (CDRs) of the calls that generated alarms, for instance to find out when these calls occurred, what their actual status and duration was, and so on. Users can even listen to the complete call recordings in order to better understand the problem and what might have caused it.

In addition to sending alarms when it detects problems, Mirador also provides an extensive range of reports that enable you to understand how your systems perform over time. Reports are not only available as email messages but also remotely through your web browser or as PDF format, on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.

Mirador is available now with a range of flexible options. It is also available as a free trial. For more information about Mirador, visit http://www.nuecho.com/mirador.

About Nu Echo

Nu Echo develops high performance speech recognition applications and development tools. Building on two decades of expertise in speech recognition application development, Nu Echo is uniquely equipped to deliver applications and tools that simply work better. The company also provides a full range of professional services, including grammar development and tuning, speech application testing, and consulting. For more information, please visit http://www.nuecho.com.

About NuBot

NuBot is an Automated IVR Testing Platform that has been designed to address key limitations of existing testing solutions. With NuBot, no programming skills are required in order to quickly and easily develop a wide variety of test scenarios, even for large and complex applications and a fully integrated suite of analysis tools are available to facilitate diagnosis of test failures. For more information about NuBot, please visit http://www.nuecho.com/nubot.

You may not have heard of Montreal-based Nu Echo, but that’s probably because you’re American. The company is well-known in Canada and boasts major customers there — Air Canada, RBC Financial, and Telus, just as a sampling. The company bills itself as speech experts and certainly has the DNA and projects to back up that claim.

Yves Normandin, CEO of Nu Echo, founded the company in 2002. Prior to that, he was founder and CTO of LocusDialog. Yes, that LocusDialog which was bought by ScanSoft which merged with Nuance. So if there’s anyone who knows speech — the technology and the business — it’s him.

The company firmly believes that speech technology has been wrongfully accused of damaging user experience. It has faith in speech technology because it knows it inside and out. Nu Echo’s expertise lies in developing tools and performance tuning to speech systems so that their full benefit is realized. Much like an automobile, a speech system requires regular maintenance to achieve its best performance.

Aside from professional services, Nu Echo has four distinct products: NuGram, NuBot, NuAddress, and NuID:

• NuGram – A complete grammar development platform, based on open source Eclipse framework.
• NuBot – Originally devised as an internal tool for testing, now productized as a hosted IVR application test solution. Monitoring features to come soon.
• NuAddress – The leading Canadian address capture solution in the industry, the result of over three years of R&D.
• NuID – An application to provide automated identity authentication, something that contact centers do every day. NuID is highly optimized and specialized just for this purpose and is able to achieve over 90% success rate.

The 20-person company is heavy on the developer side, so expect it to produce new tools and products regularly. The company advocates “test-driven development,” an approach that some other firms find hard to swallow (or willingly ignore). However, as Nu Echo’s track records have proven, this approach fits speech app development perfectly. Add on top Nu Echo’s obsession with performance tuning and monitoring, and you would get an ironclad speech app deployment.

Normandin is also eager to expand its business south of the border. So, my fellow Americans, prepare your speech systems for the invasion…

A busy day for Nu Echo, a leading speech recognition grammar development platform company based in Montreal, Canada. The company announces the availability of its NuGram Server Free Developer Edition:

One of the revolutionary features of the NuGram Platform is the ability to develop dynamic grammarsjust as easily as static grammars, using the same powerful environment and set of tools, and to deploy them as simply as JSP pages. This means that there is no longer any need for the traditionally complex, error prone, and difficult to test approaches for developing dynamic grammars. Until now, however, developers could not easily experiment with the dynamic grammar features of the NuGram Platform since, in order to do so, they were required to purchase a license of NuGram Server. With the introduction of a Free Developer Edition, this is no longer the case.

Download NuGram Server Developer Edition now!

And version 2.2 of NuGram IDE:

The most important feature introduced in this release is the support for Java to populate dynamic grammars. When using NuGram IDE, you use the exact same code to test and tune your grammar that will run in production, but without the long deployment cycle associated with stopping, deploying and restarting a Java web application. And deploying your grammars in NuGram Server is as simple as deploying JSP pages.

Speech geeks, go forth and frolic in the merry ways of grammar development!

Dominique Boucher of Nu Echo makes a good observation in the world of voice APIs:

In fact, the new approaches are not programming models, they essentially provide low-level instructions for the various voice platforms. Much like a virtual machine. It’s up to the user of the platform to implement its own programming model on top of these instruction sets. And this is a very attractive offer, as this will most certainly ignite the development of new application programming environments and frameworks, some of which will be platform agnostic.

We lived a somewhat similar period at the end of the last century. There were many non-interoperable proprietary IVR platforms, and the industry came up with a solution: VoiceXML. Will we see something similar happen with these new approaches? I doubt it. I think that all these approaches are sufficiently similar that a good abstraction layer on the application side can suffice to support them all easily. In the 90’s, porting an application to a new platform was plainly impossible without a complete rewrite.

As we’ve seen new programming languages and paradigms flourish in recent years, it appears that the voice API space mirrors the same trend. Just as software engineers entered the “post-Java era,” we may be on the verge of a “post-VXML era”?