VIENNA, 12 October 2001: SAIL LABS Technology, one of the world’s leading speech technology solutions providers, today released its Conversational System 1.0.2, an upgrade version that offers increased efficiency, broader scalability, and significant improvements in telephony interface compatibility.

The award-winning Conversational System is a Natural Language Understanding (NLU)-based dialog system that serves as a voice interface to a wide variety of content. Its pure, statistics-based NLU environment is a tremendous advance on traditional grammar-based dialog systems as it gives the system the ability to hold free-flowing, intention-seeking conversations. In economic terms, this translates into quick task execution, greater efficiency, and, ultimately, considerable cost-savings.

The Conversational System 1.0.2 features the following major refinements:

• Higher-density channel configuration; the system can be configured with more parallel lines without entailing a corresponding increase in hardware requirements;

• Broader scalability; now from between a 30-line system to a 10,000-line system;

• Full compatibility with the latest, more versatile Release 1.3 of Brooktrout Technology’s Real Comm S.100 driver;

• Lower maintenance requirements;

• The capability of processing large audio files, i.e. with playback of longer than 20 minutes.

The latest refinements give the system even greater configuration flexibility than it had in earlier versions. Taken together with the use of existing open standards, such as CORBA objects, and the system’s DialogXML and Java program code—the new features enable developers and end-users to easily implement and integrate the Conversational System in a wide range of configurations.

The new Conversational System 1.0.2 also provides the base for the Conversational System Application Development Kit (ADK) 1.0.2, which is also being released today.