Paris, March 14, 2005 - Telecom & Media France, an industry practice of Capgemini, and Telisma, a European leader in speech recognition, have won the New Usages Innovation Trophy for 2004. The Trophy was awarded on March 9th 2005 by France Telecom and Syntec Informatique, the French association of the software and computing services companies which gathers more than 480 groups and companies and generate over 80% of the IT sector’s sales.
The competition, in its first year, aims to recognise the benefits of effective collaboration between IT and telecommunications and to encourage the development of new markets in the telecoms industry through the promotion of innovative solutions.
The prize was awarded to Capgemini and telisma for the My Contacts project France Telecom for France Telecom, which was successfully launched in October 2004.
Laurent Balaine, CEO of Telisma, said: "This prize represents acknowledgment by the IT community of the innovative dimension of Capgemini and telisma’s solution, which has provend its industrial qualities through this large scale deployment. It also demonstrates its capacity to create new usages for the general public. This is proof that voice-commanded technologies are mature enough for operators to be confortable in using them happily use them as a development tool on a large scale".
The solution
My Contacts is a new service for users which takes advantage of recent innovations in technology to make voice-activated calling much more straight forward. The voice-activated address book from France Telecom is France’s first fixed-line service to enable users to access a personal address book from the fixed-line via voice. To call someone, users dial 3001, say their first-name, surname or nickname, and specify where contact should be reached, for example "Dad at home", "Claire on her mobile", the network will then search and directly dial the number. The address book can be managed from a fixed-line (vocal mode), over the Internet on the France Telecom customer website (francetelecom.com) or by Minitel.
The Capgemini / telisma partnership
The strength of the Capgemini and telisma partnership was vital to the success of the project and ultimately what secured the award. The two companies had worked together on the successful implementation of the 3000 project, the first France Telecom vocal service, and were confident that the teams would work together effectively as a single unit to ensure the best results.
Capgemini consultants led the project and provided both solution integration and the vocal platform, telisma supplied the speech recognition technology and the specialised skills related to fine-tuning the application to fit France Telecom’s requirements, and France Teéleécom’s R&D practice supported the innovation in terms of creating new services.
Jean Bernot, Sales Development Director at Capgemini, added: "This project demonstrates the value of Capgemini’s Collaborative Business Experience approach. Thanks to a good dialogue and tight collaboration between the France Telecom, Capgemini and telisma teams, the project was delivered on time and an innovative solution was delivered to the client. The project offers real confidence to added value for the end user."
Technical innovation points
The speech technology implemented by telisma and integrated by Capgemini in My Contacts represents a major innovation in several fields. In particular, this is the first service of this scale to benefit from the dynamic speech recognition data. The technology enables real-time voice recognition as the words that the system analyses are only known at the time of the call, therefore taking into account the modifications made by the user in their contact list on the Internet in real time.
My Contacts is a forerunner to the fixed-mobile convergence solutions of the future, and delivers a service of great value to a new generation of users who have become familiar with voice commands and computerisation of their personal address books.
