Telisma announces the availability of two new languages: South African English and Afrikaans are now available with teliSpeech Recognizer, telisma's leading network speech recognition engine. Along with the existing teliSpeech languages, they can be used on all leading IVR platforms including: Avaya, Cisco, Envox-Syntellect, Genesys, HP, Holly, OnMobile, Voxeo... and more!

These new language packs are the result of the collaboration between telisma and its South African partner, CatchWord, a pioneer in the sector of speech technologies in Southern Africa.

With over 42-million mobile subscribers, South Africa is the fourth-fastest growing mobile communications market in the world. Southern Africa's linguistic variety is a true challenge for voice services access, as it gathers at least eleven official languages within the region.

South African English is spoken in South Africa and in neighbouring countries with a large number of Anglo-Africans living in them, such as Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Lesotho.

Afrikaans is mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia, with smaller numbers of speakers living in Botswana, Angola, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Zambia, Australia, New Zealand, United States of America, Taiwan and Argentina.

True to its commitment of enabling each and every person in the world to access voice services over the telephone using their own language, telisma continues to invest in expanding its language coverage and widen its presence in Southern Africa.

About telisma
telisma, an OnMobile Global Ltd company (www.onmobile.com), is a leading provider of software speech technologies. It enables people to use their own vernacular language to access value added services and interactive voice services over the telephone wherever they are in the world. The company's Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) software, teliSpeech Recognizer, is a truly scalable, carrier-grade ASR solution. Open, flexible and robust, teliSpeech Recognizer enables simple, user-friendly, speech-enabled solutions at a low cost thanks to a very powerful Eclipse^TM-based toolkit called teliSpeech Studio. Telisma is based in France with sales offices in India.

About CatchWord
CatchWord was established in 2002 as a spin-off company following dedicated research projects conducted within the Engineering and Arts faculties at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. Due to its association with the university and related centres and laboratories, it has access to a wealth of technical and linguistic expertise in developing multi-lingual speech based communication systems functioning, for instance, in indigenous (official) languages of South Africa. CatchWord is also actively involved in the development of speech-based mobile learning systems (www.melfaproject.net) as well as in speech mining. (www.catchwordlst.co.za)

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