Active Voice SPEAK—Speech-enabled Auto Attendant for the SMB Masses
By Nancy Jamison, Jamison Consulting President and Editor-in-Chief (Originally published on April 16, 2008)
We have speech-enabled solutions for the SMB market out there already. In fact, I will be writing about some of them in a Q1 update of my 12 days of UC blog, probably next week. But Active Voice, who have been in the voice/unified messaging market for more than a decade, has finally cracked the code on providing an affordable, single-digit IQ (SDIQ) installation, speech-enabled auto-attendant for the SMB market. That would be the many people are starting to pay attention to, but still much underserved SMB market.
OK, joking aside, this is a good thing – a very good thing. As I said earlier, there are solutions for the market, and in fact Active Voice has one already, called SEVEN, which utilizes Nuance technology as the speech engine. So why do another? Active Voice, and the SMB market, needed a simpler, easier to use and cheaper offering - plain and simple. I think they have done it. Here are the details:
Simplicity and Ease of Use
• SPEAK is an appliance-based offering, with plug ‘n play installation
• SPEAK is self-configuring. Customers only need to deal with two web pages to upload names from a CSV file or Active Directory
• SPEAK requires no IT support
Cost
• SPEAK uses LumenVox as the speech engine, driving down the cost
• SPEAK uses Digium rather than relying on a board or gateway, plummeting the cost of hardware.
SPEAK provides users with some pretty nifty mobility features. Besides being the traditional auto-attendant for calls coming into a business, it acts as one internally as well, enabling employees to pick up the phone and dial by voice, but also enabling them to dial into their own speech portal to get to emails and calendar information too, from their desks or while out of the office.
SPEAK isn’t a replacement for SEVEN, however, even though it can scale up to thousands of users too. SEVEN has some attractive attributes of its own that “speak” to some customers in the SMB market, and certainly larger customers, such as the 44 languages that it supports. At first release SPEAK only supports three.
There you have it; a very agreeable SMB auto-attendant solution, with a lot of function for the price. I think this is spot on with what the SMB market needs.
About AVST
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of Unified Communications solutions with over 15 million users relying on its products and services to maximize their productivity. With three decades of innovation excellence, AVST is solely focused on delivering communications solutions that increase individual, group and enterprise productivity. Its flagship Unified Communications platform, CallXpress®, offers best in class interoperability, scalability and resiliency while delivering advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification capabilities. With CallXpress, an organization can uniquely protect and extend its existing IT and telephony infrastructure investments — now and into the future.
Headquartered in Orange County, Calif., AVST maintains facilities in Seattle, Wash. and the United Kingdom and has remote sales offices throughout the United States. AVST's Unified Communications solutions are sold and supported internationally by an extensive network of resellers and OEM partners. For more information contact Denny Michael, Vice President of Marketing, at 949-699-2300 or access the company's website at www.avst.com.
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