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.”

 

The Web telephony space welcomes another competitor today: Teleku (a project of GetVocal, Inc.). For all you Web developers in search of telephony APIs, rejoice! for you have another set of programming goodies to choose from.

Why Teleku over competitors Tropo and Twilio? According to this TechCrunch piece:

So how does Teleku differ from Twilio? It’s a matter of flexibility, according to founder (and sole employee) Chris Matthieu. He says that when you use Twilio, it’s an all-in-one deal: you write your code in Twilo’s easy-to-use syntax called TwiML, which is then sent to Twilio’s telephony services in the cloud that are hosted on AWS. That’s great (and may be even preferable to some people), but with Twilio you can’t port your application to a cheaper service should one become available.

With Teleku, you can write your code using TwiML, or you can use Teleku’s own simplified telephony scripting language, called PhoneML. Your code is then sent to Teleku’s servers, which translate it into industry standard (but harder to write) VoiceXML. Matthieu says you can use that code on any of a variety of established telephony providers, including Voxeo and Plum Voice, and it will also work with enterprise systems that rely on VoiceXML.

Matthieu says this gives Teleku users a few advantages: first, they can swap between various providers if they find a better rate. And he also says that Voxeo and other telecom services have better optimized their servers than AWS has to work with voice traffic, and that they offer a few features that Twilio doesn’t yet, like speech recognition.

Finally, Teleku offers a wizard for building web-enabled telephony services for people who don’t have any coding experience at all. This allows you to select actions from a dropdown menu, like “Play”, “Speak”, and “Transfer” (you then fill in text dialogs to instruct the application what to say or what number to transfer to). You can drag and drop these actions depending on what order you’d like to execute each action. Watch the video below for a complete demo of the wizard.

Sounds like a good combination of features and user experience. VoiceXML is certainly the industry standard and would be a plus to developers who’d want portable applications. The behind-the-curtain star is certainly Voxeo, for providing the platform and speech recognition feature. But no doubt Matthieu did a tremendous job in designing PhoneML and the user-friendly online tool for making it work seamlessly.

And judging by the fact that founder/developer Matthieu tweeted last at 2:30am and got TechCrunched, he’s probably having a very busy day…

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”?