Speech recognition software is fine if you speak British or American English. But what if you are South African and pronounce the words "park" and "car" as "pork" and "core"? Until now, speech recognition technology has had limited application in South Africa, where a wide variety of accents is spoken.
Now, however, Intelleca Voice & Mobile in Johannesburg, together with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the global company ScanSoft, have developed software to recognize "Seff Effricken" accents. It was a huge job. South Africa has 17 local languages, 11 of them official, as well as large Chinese, Italian and Indian communities. Intelleca spent three years making more than three million voice recordings.
The new product, SA English Acoustic Model, allows South African companies to use speech recognition technology in automated telephone directory services or automated call routing. This should help the country's growing call-centre industry. "The industry is still not price-competitive when compared with markets such as India," Mike Renzon, head of Intelleca, told the Financial Mail. "Automating just 5 to 15 per cent of calls coming into a call centre would reduce our costs." The company is now planning acoustic models for all 11 official languages.
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