Paris, FRANCE – November 17th 2008: CatchWord & telisma are collaborating to co-develop languages that can be used with the teliSpeech™ Recognizer for the Southern African market. Today, they are pleased to announce their collaboration on South-African English and Afrikaans, with more regional languages to follow.

With over 39-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. The collaboration between telisma and CatchWord will offer those mobile subscribers the option to use their own language to access services, information, knowledge and entertainment.

Telisma, an international leader in the field of speech processing solutions for mass market applications, is the preferred partner of telecom operators and large enterprises. Its South African partner, CatchWord, brings the power of languages and speech technologies to South Africa.

Together, Telisma and CatchWord have shared tools and know-how for the benefit of the speech community.

Telisma and CatchWord have proven telisma’s unique collaborative approach to the design and development of industrial speech processing solutions, based on the open Eclipse™ development environment. Both the South African English and Afrikaans languages are being developed by CatchWord using the teliSpeech™ Language Development Kit (LDK) and will soon be available with the teliSpeech™ Recognizer, telisma’s Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) software.

“We approached CatchWord to start the talks of collaboration in the spirit of telisma’s open strategy. Conscious of our unrivalled joint expertise in the development of speech technologies and solutions in Southern Africa, this alliance will help accelerate the availability of ASR in more Southern African countries, such as Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.” stated Eric Le Flour, co-Founder and VP, Strategy and Business Development, telisma.

CatchWord Managing Director, Professor Justus Roux explained that this partnership agreement is aligned with the Company’s strategy to work closely with leading technology providers to conceptualize and develop innovative technologies and tools to enable effective human-centric computer interactions.

“We are confident the open collaboration with telisma on the technical and commercial levels, combined with our expertise, enables us to offer leading edge speech processing solutions that best meet the needs of Southern African customers and support their growth. The jointly developed product will also further reinforce CatchWord as a leading provider of speech technologies in the region,” said Justus Roux.

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™-based toolkit called teliSpeech Studio. Telisma is based in France with sales offices in the UK and 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. (http://www.catchwordlst.co.za)