Mobile workers can now “talk” to their telephones while on the road. This means that they can keep their eyes on the road and stay safely connected to the office using speech commands with their own “personal assistant”, Avaya Inc. announced today.  The speech interface is now included at no additional license cost with the company’s latest version of Avaya’s industry-leading unified messaging platform to further enhance the value of unified communications.

The Avaya Unified Communication one-X® Speech interface helps you communicate to your communication device by commanding it to perform duties like scheduling meetings, conference calls, calling people and much more. Its an excellent tool for the busy Indian professional to conveniently perform tasks, listen to messages with this 24X7 personal assistant. Further, this addition should be path breaking in terms of further enhancing the feature rich Unified Messaging offering from Avaya with single number access, find-me follow-me, call screening and networking features.

Avaya Modular Messaging 4.0 now includes the Avaya one-X® Speech interface to a personal assistant, enabling hands-free access to calling and conferencing capabilities, voice, email and fax messaging, enterprise directories and databases, calendars, contacts and task lists – from any telephone. Avaya one-X Speech helps improve responsiveness and safety for employees on the road by eliminating the need to read messages or to text-while-driving. 

"Unified Communications is about converging features such as our award-winning Modular Messaging and one-X Speech applications,” said Mary Dunlop, Vice President, Unified Communications Product Management, Avaya.  “Our goal is to ensure cost-effective solutions where companies and employees benefit from improved collaboration, responsiveness and simplified access to the wide range of communications tools used today.” 

Using speech commands with Modular Messaging 4.0 and one-X Speech, employees can instruct the personal assistant to:

• Access and manage all messages, including read emails via text to speech and reply with an attached .wav file; search for messages by person, date or time.
• Launch calls and conference calls by simply speaking the names of the people they want to call
• Create or review appointments, send meeting requests and manage tasks 
• Allow callers to leave a message or opt to “find” the person they are calling

Avaya one-X Speech incorporates industry-leading, natural language speech recognition technologies from Nuance Communications, a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions and an Avaya DevConnect program member. 

 “As consumer behavior evolves, technology must evolve as well to provide options for users to stay connected, while keeping safety paramount to mobile communications,” said Mike Thompson, VP and General Manager of Mobile Speech at Nuance Communications.  “By implementing speech recognition technology from Nuance to its one-X Speech messaging platform, Avaya is bridging the communication gap for users who need access to information any time, anywhere.”

Avaya Modular Messaging 4.0 with Avaya one-X Speech adds speech access for IBM Lotus Domino 7.0, and upgrades compatibility with Microsoft Exchange 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.  In addition, users can now record up to nine optional greetings – and each one in up to three different languages with the new multi-lingual call answer feature.  Callers only hear a greeting in their preferred language.

Avaya Modular Messaging 4.0 with one-X Speech is now globally available in English, and can be purchased separately or as part of the Unified Communications Editions suite of products.

An example of the application in a campus-wide environment can be seen in Villanova University in the US. Villanova made a campus-wide transition to Modular Messaging from its Octel voice mail system to move up to unified messaging with speech-enabled access. 

“We have a number of administrative staff and faculty who travel frequently, in addition to those who commute to Villanova’s campus in the Philadelphia metro area,” said Bob Mays, director, IT, Villanova University. “Avaya Modular Messaging with speech access helps them stay current with their messages and meeting whether they’re on campus or remotely.”

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