Tata Cellular’s interactive Voice messaging service

By Our Staff Reporter, Hyderabad June 27: Tata Cellular in association with Chennai based Speech and Software Technologies (I) Pvt. Ltd. (SSTIL) announced the introduction of a unique service “VoiceMe”, an interactive voice messaging service, for the first in the country in Andhra Pradesh.

The voice service converts text messages of any size send to a cellular phone (from a cellular phone or a computer) into voice messages and plays them over the user’s cellular phone.

These messages are carried in the wave file format and the recipiente of the massage can listen to them either on their computers or on their cellular phones.

At the press conference here on Wednesday, Mr. Prateek Pashine of SSTIL (also a Tata group company), said it had tied up with a second cellular operater also for the voiceme (unfied messaging solution --- UMS) service to be launched by mid-July in another state the country. They were also providing the IVRS (interactive voice response system) to a leading automobile company and these cars were expected to hit the road in 2002.

SSTIL was primarily an IPR company into speech technologies---speech recognition, speaker verification and text-to-speech system.

It had developed speech recognition software for the Indian market in collaboration with IBM Corporation --- Indian English Via Voice. It developed its own limited vocabulary speech recognition engine.

Mr. S. K. Subramanian, COO of Tata Cellular, said it proposed to introduce VoiceMme in three other circles where it had a presence Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Madhya pradesh. The service was being offered free of charge initially by Tata Cellular for 30 days, he said.


Source: Hindu, June 28, 2001 edition