Sakhr Software launches Sakhr's Arabic ASR 4.0 speech recognition engine

The version 4.0 of the ASR is the successor of Sakhr's ASR 3.0, containing new functionalities to ease application development and integration, increase accuracy and improve application usability. The ASR engine enables IVR systems to understand people's natural Arabic speech through spoken words in different Arabic accents. Developed for telephony speech applications, the recognition engine provides speech recognition and understanding for human-like telephony services.

With ASR 4.0, developers can create robust and easy-to-use application interfaces designed to increase customer self-service, shorten transaction completion time and boost customer satisfaction levels. The ASR is designed to enable highly accurate, scalable, and easy to deploy voice solutions ranging from directory assistance, banking solutions, auto-attendant systems, product ordering, solutions for visually impaired and customer care to industry specific applications including airline reservations, brokerage, and many more.

Sakhr' ASR software is a speaker-independent, open, standards-based recognition engine optimized for scalability, accuracy, and performance particularly for wireless environments and hands-free operation. The engine delivers unparalleled accuracy, often exceeding 95% in both wireless and landline deployments and exceptionally in noisy environments. It allows natural human-like dialogues through its robust grammar based barge-in feature. The latest ASR engine release builds on the advanced capabilities of the version 3.0 to provide memory and CPU savings and support for application vocabularies containing millions of entries.

"This version of the ASR is packaged with the latest features required by the market and the highest accuracy ever achieved," said Jihad Salman, product manager for speech technologies at Sakhr. "Sakhr's ASR 4.0 allows the developers to easily speech-enable their telephony applications for the Arabic market and with its high accuracy enhances the quality of service while increasing the customers' satisfaction."

The engine 4.0 comes with a completely revised toolkit, which comprises a complete set of new tools and enhanced support of the entire application development process via a consistent and ergonomic workflow scheme. The new toolkit provides more graphical user interface (GUI) tools for application design, as well as for application tuning and evaluation. It incorporates tools for easily training with open grammars and for creating and transcribing speech corpora.