Vienna, Austria, 28 November 2003: SAIL LABS Technology's Communication Mining System, a framework including innovative Speech and Language Processing for use in the call center, receives today the MERCUR 2003 award.

SAIL LABS Technology has previously received the MERCUR award in 2001 for the Media Mining System and in 2002 for the Conversational System.

The Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry presents the award every year to products developed in Vienna, Austria, that represent a significant milestone for the Austrian Industry. The award was established in order to motivate and support the innovative potential of Viennese enterprises. There were more than thirty entries spanning several industries and ranging from small and medium enterprises to large multinational organisations. A high-ranking independent expert jury reached the decision after several rounds of evaluation. According to President Walter Nettig, “The award symbolises not only an idealistic honour, but also brings with it an increase in market awareness which is reflected in the economic success of the product.”

The Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry supports entrepreneurs with a multiplicity of initiatives, meetings and a global information and service supply. There were basically three main selection criteria for the award, namely significant technical innovation, economic impact and good market opportunities. Other factors that were taken into account were creativity in product ideas, and customer orientation.

In 2001, the Sail Labs Media Mining System, a product capable of indexing and storing multimedia information in Real Time, received a special acknowledgement from the MERCUR Panel. The Media Mining System was a substantial leap forward for the media observation and broadcasting industry, where traditionally, manual indexing had been the norm.

“The award for the Communication Mining System in 2002 recognised our mature solutions in the field of interactive call-center applications. This year's award for the Communication Mining framework is an expression of the technological achievements while building solutions for off-line speech and language processing in the call center. This technical recognition is accompanied by strong demand in the market,” says Christoph Prinz, Chief Operating Officer at Sail Labs Technology. Mr. Prinz is receiving the award on behalf of Sail Labs from the executive board of Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry today.

The Communication Mining Framework is a platform for flexible deployment of Speech and Language technologies in call centers. The Communication Mining Framework is designed to handle multiple qualities of speech, like spontaneos speech, dialects and mixed language communication. The system allows you to automatically gather data about the communication like "who is talking to whom", "how long are they talking", "in what language are they talking", is it a male or a female talking, collect statistics about emotions, and get a rough transcript. Using the Communication Mining Server, you can search your database of customer interactions and rank the results in order of importance as indicated by your personal preferences. This way you have a tool for finding the "needle in the haystack" of your call center communication for uses like performance analysis, analysis of impact of your new marketing campaign, filtering for certain product or service specific keywords.