New York, NY - August 24, 2009 -- Voxeo, the leading provider of Unified Communications and Self-Service platforms, and Nu Echo, a leading developer of high performance speech recognition applications and development tools, announced a new collaboration to make it easier for customers to rapidly develop speech applications using the Eclipse integrated development environment. One of the challenges historically in developing voice applications has been the time involved with creating the "grammar" of words and phrases used to interact with the customer. Starting today, Voxeo will offer Nu Echo's NuGram grammar development tool in an integrated package with Voxeo's VoiceObjects Service Creation Environment. This integration allows developers to easily create either static or dynamic grammars that can be used with VoiceObjects technology to efficiently build multichannel self-service applications.

Designed to support the rigorous grammar development processes required in order to efficiently produce solid grammars, NuGram IDE Basic Edition:

• Enables developers to author grammars using one single concise and legible format, regardless of the target speech recognition engine
• Offers a grammar editor with several advanced features, including syntax coloring, content-assist (code completion, quick fixes, code templates, etc.) and sophisticated refactoring tools.
• Provides powerful grammar analysis, visualization, and debugging tools.
• Provides tools to test grammar coverage and semantic interpretation correctness.

NuGram reduces cost and time to market by accelerating grammar development and making it possible to detect and correct most grammar problems before deployment, thereby minimizing costly fix and redeployment loops. The ability to use the same environment for both static and dynamic grammars enhances the application development process by enabling grammar developers to focus on all the grammars in an application, while application developers focus on implementing the dialog. The fact that it's an Eclipse plug-in makes it easy to integrate with most speech application development environments.

"T-Mobile has been pleased by the boost in productivity and quality in speech grammar development delivered by the combined use of the VoiceObjects tools and NuGram IDE," comments Jan Safka, Senior Head of Voice and Mobile Service at T-Mobile. "Using Nu Echo's tools for speech grammar development and quality assurance that are integrated with the VoiceObjects products, speech-based IVR projects can now be delivered quicker and with higher and more consistent speech recognition quality."

"The combined and powerful features of Voxeo, VoiceObjects, IMified, and NuGram will enable the development of a whole new generation of multichannel dialog applications in a unified way," underlines Michael Codini, Managing Director at Voxeo Germany. "The same application could be deployed as a speech-enabled IVR application, an IMbot, and even an HTML interface for mobile devices, without limiting the dialog to using simple, fixed choices. Outbound applications will even be able to reach users based on their preferred channel or their presence."

"The joining of forces between Voxeo and Nu Echo is another corner stone to provide developers with an integrated, comprehensive source to easily build and deploy Unified Communications and Self-Service applications," comments Yves Normandin, CEO at Nu Echo on the agreed software distribution partnership. "The availability of a free grammar development environment that transparently supports static and dynamic grammars will finally enable the grammar developer community to start sharing dynamic grammars that will be usable across recognition engines and service creation environments." For more information please visit Voxeo at www.voxeo.com/nugram.

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