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 India Limited (SSTIL) announced the introduction of a unique service ``VoiceMe'', an interactive voice messaging service, for the first time in the country in Andhra Pradesh.

The VoiceMe service converts text messages of any size sent 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 recipients of the message can listen to them either on their computers or on their cellular phones.

At a press conference here on Wednesday, Mr. Prateek Pashine of SSTIL (also a Tata group company), said it had tied up with a second cellular operator also for the VoiceMe (unified messaging solution - UMS) service to be launched by mid-July in another State.

Mr. Pashine disclosed that an MoU was signed with a major telecom service provider for UMS service to be offered throughout 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 ViaVoice. It developed its own limited vocabulary speech recognition engine.

Mr. S. K. Subramanian, COO of Tata Cellular, said it proposed to introduce VoiceMe 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.

Mr. Prakash Shukla, President, SSTIL, said in a statement that the revolutionary technology would radically change the way people communicate with each other and had the power to outstrip conventional text messaging.

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Section  : Business
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