OnMobile acquires telisma, Europe’s leading Speech technology & language processing software provider.
Paris/Mumbai, 1st July 2008: OnMobile, India's leading and pioneering Telecom Value Added Services (VAS) provider today announced that it has acquired 100% of the leading European Speech Recognition company, telisma.
The addition of telisma’s standards compliant speech recognition products & expertise will enable OnMobile to accelerate its penetration into fast growing emerging markets by developing new speech recognition language models. This technology enables quick and easy access to mobile applications and content and also strengthens OnMobile’s mobile applications product suite.
Telisma was created in August 2000 as a spin-off from France Telecom’s Research and Development Laboratory funded by leading European venture capital firms. Telisma has a team of around 40 employees including 9 PhDs & 18 engineers and has its operations in Europe & India. Telisma’s core products centre around language processing software, which is used by telecom operators and enterprises for simple, intuitive interactivity with voice portal applications and customer care. Telisma has in-depth Intellectual property of over 200 man-years of speech technology as a result of in-house R&D development; this provides the solid foundation for launching new language models and rapid launch of new voice based services around the world.
Arvind Rao, CEO & co-founder of OnMobile said, "We are excited about joining hands with telisma to deliver a powerful suite of technology, applications and services to the global telecom industry. Their depth of knowledge and leadership in Speech technologies perfectly complements our expertise in speech application development, enabling the way for a new generation of innovative telecom services."
Laurent Balaine, CEO, telisma said, "We are very excited to expand our presence in this exciting marketplace with OnMobile. We're confident that the combined strengths, services expertise, and talent of our companies will deliver a great experience for Users, Service Providers and mobile operators. OnMobile fully supports telisma’s collaborative & partner friendly strategy to make speech technologies open and pervasive "
About OnMobile
OnMobile is India’s largest white labeled VAS company for Mobile, Landline and Media Service Providers, with growing international presence in emerging markets. OnMobile offers telecom Value Added Services (VAS), Voice portals, RingBack Tones, mobile content aggregation & distribution, interactive media portals, mobile advertising, 1-to-1 direct marketing on mobiles and M-Commerce. The products are accessible across all channels including Voice, SMS, WAP, USSD & rich client On-Device Portals.
Incorporated in the year 2000, OnMobile is the first Indian telecom VAS Company to go public. It made its debut on the two prominent Indian Stock Exchanges in Feb 2008. OnMobile is headquartered in Bangalore, India where it has a large R&D center and network operations center. OnMobile also has offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Singapore, Paris, Jakarta, London, Kuala Lumpur, Seattle and Sydney. OnMobile has an employee strength of over 900. For more information, please visit www.onmobile.com.
This is the third acquisition completed by OnMobile in the past 3 years. The earlier two comprised of an Indian handset software company and a European data software products provider.
About telisma
telisma is a leading provider of software speech technologies. It empowers people enabling them 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 office in the UK and India. For more information, please visit www.telisma.com.
