The Netherlands’ Royal Philips Electronics company was contracted to develop Arabic-language speech recognition solutions, in collaboration with the Emirates Telecommunications Corporation’s (Etisalat) Contact Center in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to serve the Arabian Gulf, Northern Africa and the Middle East.
Etisalat and Philips Speech Processing, a business unit of Royal Philips Electronics funded by the European Commission (EC), will build linguistic database resources throughout the Arabic-speaking world.
The project, known as OrienTel, aims at creating an automatic speech-recognition system (ASR) of the Arabic language. This requires a large database of voice samples combining all the different dialects and accents in the Arab world. The Etisalat Contact Center will collect representative speech samples, with the target date for the completion of the sample database building set for six months’ time.
The OrienTel project will ensure multi-lingual access to business services such as directory assistance, unified messaging, information retrieval, banking and other service portals by allowing users to speak the language most convenient for them.
The Arabic-language speech recognition solutions will allow Arabs to use these speech-enabled services over the telephone in modern standard Arabic, colloquial UAE Arabic or Egyptian Arabic instead of just English, which is currently used.
Europe’s largest electronics company, Philips Electronics has sales of 32.3 billion euro in 2001. It manufactures color television sets, lighting, electric shavers, medical diagnostic imaging and patient monitoring and one-chip TV products. Its 184,000 employees in more than 60 countries are active in the areas of lighting, consumer electronics, domestic appliances, components, semiconductors and medical systems.
Etisalat is a provider of communication solutions, offering multimedia and value added services in fixed line and GSM, Internet services and e-commerce solutions. It's divisions and subsidiaries include smart cards and related solutions, data clearing house, contact center, submarine cable laying and maintenance services, several international submarine cable links, an international Internet exchange, academy and college and cable TV.
Based on an estimated UAE population figure of three million, mobile penetration in the emirates is currently approximately 65 percent and fixed line penetration is approximately 33 percent. — (menareport.com)
© 2002 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
