Lucent and Unisys encourage developers to get talkative

NEWS Lucent Technologies and Unisys are to integrate their speech technology products. The two companies will sell a combined package to speech application developers, which includes Lucent's text-to-speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) engines, both born out of Bell Labs. Unisys will contribute its Natural Language Speech Assistant (NLSA) Speech Assistant Toolkit. The aim is to tap the interactive voice response (IVR) and telephony markets, prompting developers to replace push button instructions with intelligent, voice activated applications. Telecoms equipment manufacturer Lucent earlier this year said it will work with Intel to develop remote products using TSS technology.