E-Mail gets voice with Tata Cell’s VoiceMe

Our Hyderabad Bureau, June 27: Tata Cellular has given a voice to e-mails now with its VoiceMe service which the company claims to be the country’s first voice navigated audio system through which people can actually send e-mails to be read out by a synthesised voice on your hand-phone.

The unique service, launched here on Wednesday, has been introduced by TCL in Andhra Pradesh in association with Speech and Software Technologies (I) Pvt. Ltd. (SSTIL), a Chennai-based Tata Enterprise.

TCL claims that it is the first cellular operator in the country to offer the service that can change your e-mail, however lengthy, into voice message and send the message to the cellular phones. VoiceMe is based on Indian English ViaVoice, a continuous speech recognition software developed by SSTIL for the Indian market in collaboration with IBM. The company, which owns the license for packaging and distributing the product, has developed acoustic and language model for the product to recognise the Indian accent.

VoiceMe service converts text messages of any size into voice messages sent to a cellular phone and plays them over the phone. Long messages, even with text and HTML attachments, can be sent over VoiceMe unlike current e-mail or SMS services. Subscribers can access the service to send a message to friends in their own voice, send two-minute and receive messages on the VoiceMe service.

The service is currently being offered without any charges or rentals to all post paid subscribers of TCL across Andhra Pradesh. The introduction of VoiceMe is an effort from TCL to introduce yet another innovative product to add value to the customers’ communication needs," said TCL’s CEO S K Subramanian. TCL is initially offering the service based on IVR system free to all its post paid subscribers across Andhra Pradesh and later would extend the service to other circles.

SSTIL has developed its own limited vocabulary speech recognition engine which is robust against telephone channel variations. A speaker authentication system has been developed based on the speaker’s voice for secure access to information remotely. The system is accurate for cellular telephone and microphones used for desktop computers SSTIL is a specialist firm working with cutting edge technologies focused on voice-enabled productivity enhancing solutions.

Mr. Prateek Pashine representing the technology group of the Indian Hotels said that the software is the only integrated voice and e-mail messaging product available in the market. The product assumes significance in a country where the PC affordability is low, access charges are high and low computer literacy. Mr. Pashine said that the unified messaging system is currently under deployment with TCL and another cellular operator and an MoU was signed with a major telecom service provider for UMS services throughout India.


Source: Economic Times, June 28, 2001 edition