Lastminute.com launches speech recognition services

NEWS Lastminute.com has launched a voice-automated service to let customers book selected hotels listed on its site by phone. More than 1,000 hotels across Europe will be available for bookings. The new service, nicknamed 'Chad', will let customers know the availability of their choice in under 30 seconds and complete a booking in under four minutes. An SMS confirmation will then be sent when the transaction is complete. The service is based on VoiceXML and Lastminute.com is claiming this is the first consumer application to use both advanced speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies.