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FAQs
Who is Broca Networks? Broca designs, deploys and hosts effective speech technology solutions to fulfil key business needs. Who are your investors? Currently we are a privately held company. Our shareholders comprise Broca's founder Directors, a number of business angels and TTP Ventures (a Corporate venture fund). We also operate a significant employee share option scheme. Where did the name originate? Paul Pierre Broca was a professor of surgical pathology at the University of Paris and a noted medical researcher. Broca became famous in the area of neurosciences through his discovery of the speech centre (now known as Broca's area or the third circumvolution of the frontal lobe). He arrived at this discovery by studying the brains of aphasic patients (persons unable to talk), particularly the brain of his first patient who was shown by Broca in 1861 to have a lesion in one side of the brain, precisely in the area which controlled speech. What do you do? Broca is focused on delivering robust and scalable applications and services for our customers in the areas of Enterprise Efficiency, Contact Centres, and the VoiceWeb. We provide a full service from project identification, analysis, design, deployment, hosting and maintenance. How would companies use this service? Companies use this service to voice enable specific applications, for example; information services, transaction services, databases - and this is just touching the surface. Would we have to re program our existing web site to accommodate voice activation? No. The infrastructure and content that has been built for a website is reutilised by the VoiceWeb. The same backend databases that power the front end website also power the front end VoiceWebsite. What is the accuracy and how does it cope with accents? Increases in computing power and huge advances in speech technology mean that speech applications can understand natural speech. Key to accuracy is good application and dialog design. The acoustic models are trained across a wide range of regional accents. The more people that use the system, the more data is available to train the system to understand further dialects. How wide a vocabulary can it understand? It can understand a wide range of vocabulary sizes. Highly complex applications will require a wider vocabulary than a smaller and simpler application. However, a well-designed system will provide prompts that will constrain the range of answers the user is likely to give, therefore permitting smaller vocabularies to be used at a given point in the dialogue, thereby maximising accuracy. Do I need special equipment on my phone? Speech recognition is processed on a network server, rather than the telephone itself, enabling systems to support large quantities of incoming calls and to recognise various ways that the user my phrase their request for the same information. No special phone or device is required to access a speech recognition applications or service. How much does this cost? Traditionally the route to deploying speech driven applications has been to own a call centre and employ human operatives or to invest in call centre replacement telephony equipment. Both options can be very expensive. Broca has an alternative solution. Broca Networks host speech driven applications and services and aggregate the infrastructure to benefit from economies of scale. This allows us to offer a cost effective and readily deployed platform to host your speech applications. Before you can launch a speech driven service there are a number of steps to follow: Step 1: Application Development Before you can deliver a voice access channel for an application, that application needs to be speech enabled. The cost of application development is dependent on the intricacy of the application and the complexity of the menu structure. Step 2: Capacity Capacity into the network is determined by port capacity. Each port equates to the ability to handle one concurrent call. 30 ports provide the capacity to handle 30 concurrent calls. Capacity is charged on a monthly basis per port. The cost per port is dependent on two things, the number of ports required and whether those ports are dedicated to your company or are non-dedicated. Step 3: Usage Broca Networks operates a price per minute model based on usage. Zero usage equates to a zero usage charge. This model can be offered as a revenue share or as part of premium rate telephone number. The usage-based tariff allows customers to scale voice applications in line with growth. This usage charge can be capped, per port or per user, at a fixed cost per month. This allows a more accurate annual cost budgeting process. For more information, please contact us. |
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