Vienna, Austria, 25 October 2002: SAIL LABS Technology’s Conversational System, an advanced Speech Technology platform has been chosen for the MERCUR2002 award as one of the most outstanding and innovative products of the year. 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.

Last year 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 Media Mining System in 2001 gave due recognition to our technological maturity in the field of Speech Technology and applied areas. This year’s award for the Conversational System is a reaffirmation of the continuous improvement in the technologies underlying our products as well as their growing market acceptability,” says Dr Monika Kerbl, Vice President Business Development at Sail Labs Technology. Dr Kerbl, will be accepting the award on Sail Labs’ behalf from the executive board of Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry in the last week of November 2002.

The Conversational System is a third generation dialog platform that forms the basis for several speech applications capable of handling spontaneous speech. Statistical utterance parsing and advanced dialog management techniques enable natural free flowing conversations. The Conversational System comes with an Application Development Kit that has a user-friendly graphical user interface for fast and easy application building. Sail Labs conducts Application Development Workshops at regular intervals to aid developers in creating their own speech applications on the Conversational System workbench.

In the field of speech technology, the Conversational System represents a new generation of technology with its reduced application development time and integrated dialog management. This underlying technology gives the user complete freedom to choose the way the dialog progresses at any point of time while interacting with the system.