If you are accustomed to handling quite a lot of your personal business over the telephone then chances are that you are quite familiar with automated speech recognition. Although this system is wonderfully convenient at times, as well as being rather cost effective, it can be a bother. It would be even more wonderful if all you needed to do was to tell the system exactly what you want. Well, this might be a reality pretty soon, because spoken language understanding (SLU) is a project that is taking on the problem of real-time understanding in the area of advanced telecommunication. This project is called the LUNA project and has a cost of 2.61 million euros. LUNA is headed by Ms Silvia Mosso who is from Loquendo, and Italian speech technology group. They are attempting to make a tool kit for multilingual services that will be able to perform human to computer communication in a way that best suits the average client. Among the issues that the LUNA project is addressing is ensuring th

According to American Airlines, their customers will be able to access flight information with the minimum of difficulty thanks to speech recognition technology. This naturally improves its service to its customers, especially those who fly with them often. Although speech recognition technology does replace the need for human employees it is meant only to increase customer service. However it also means that the airline will be able to save money because the number of its employees has been reduced. One of the features offered by American Airlines to all its clients is “Remember Me”. When a customer has signed up as part of the airline’s frequent flier program, the system will not only greet them by their own name, but will also recognize their telephone number/s. Each customer is permitted three telephone numbers from which to contact the airline that the system will remember.

A central London Healthcare facility, the HCA International, has launched a speech recognition -based radiology reporting on 12 sites. This advancement has lowered the average report creation times from the previous 12 hours to only 2:40 minutes. Acceptance level on radiologist has exceeded the 60% goal by the end of the project. And with the two-thirds on the launch completed, over 96 percent of total dictations are already being processed through speech recognition. Imaging Informatics Manager of HCA International Kaye Bonython said in a case study made by speech recognition provider Nuance Communications Inc., that the high adoption levels indicates that the profiles are excellent , reports are coming on faster and that integration is optimal.

After making speech a part of their call center operations, Nuance Communications has claimed that their client, British Airways, is now making significant financial rewards. The British Airways said that their Nuance-powered flight information line, which permits callers to speak of their flight numbers as well as access gate number and departure times, has significantly lowered the airline’s call center cost by about 95%. Furthermore, the speech system has aided the British Airways to save by cutting down its cost-per-call from $3.00 to only $0.16. The British Airways flight information line was developed by Nuance and partner Aspect Communications and has been implemented for only 16 weeks.

Burlington Company Nuance Communications Inc., provides products including speech recognition software claimed that the US Army has placed orders for the Nuance’s Dragon Medical product for the use of its 10,000 doctors. With the Dragon Medical, physicians will be able to develop medical documents and emails, search the internet using voice prompts. The company also added that the Medical Dragon is able to direct dictation into electronic health records or EHR. This device eliminates the reliance on typing and allows practitioners to spend more time with patients and practicing medicine. Nuance also claimed that, the Dragon Medical also allows for up to 25 percent less time on documenting care compared to using a non-voice enabled EHR. Nuance now claims that the US Army’s decision to use Dragon Medical increases its users to more than 90,000 caregivers worldwide.