Raytheon BBN Technologies

AVIOS Recognizes BBN for Successful Large-Scale Commercial Deployment of Semantic Speech

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 26, 2004 — BBN Technologies, a leading provider of advanced research and development services and practical solutions for both government and commercial customers, today announced that its Avoke™ suite of call center technologies and services has been awarded "Best New Speech Technology" at SpeechTEK. SpeechTEK is the annual conference of the Applied Voice Input/Output Society (AVIOS) and the world's premier event dedicated exclusively to speech products, applications, and solutions.

Firmly grounded in BBN's three decades of innovative speech and language research, Avoke improves customer satisfaction and reduces operating costs in large, inbound call centers. The Avoke Call Director, an award-wining natural language routing solution, incorporates both speech recognition and language understanding technologies, allowing callers to use their own words to define the reasons for their calls and quickly connecting them to the correct resource or agent. Avoke professional services include human factors call flow design and speech engineering following an initial assessment that captures a customer-centric snapshot of the call center's current functioning and enables accurate prediction of the gains that can be expected after deploying Avoke technologies.

Marie Meteer, Ph.D., director of Call Center Solutions at BBN, said, "This award is especially gratifying because it comes from an independent third party and recognizes the value of Avoke's ability to learn, adapt, and respond to the way callers naturally speak. For large companies or those with multiple call center sites, Avoke's semantic interpretation of customer speech is especially important because it performs reliably across regional dialects and accents, consistently delivering high levels of customer satisfaction and significant ROI regardless of regional differences in speech."