Automated Voice Hotel Reservation System Launched

Broca Networks and lastminute.com launch a service to book selected hotels listed on lastminute.com's website by phone.

Broca Networks Limited, a speech application provider and lastminute.com, the online provider of travel and leisure solutions, today announced the launch of its European voice automated hotel reservation service at the voice technology industry’s V-World conference in Florida. In what the company believes is the first application of its type in the world, lastminute.com has developed an innovative service that allows people on the move to book selected hotels listed on lastminute.com’s website by phone.

The service is designed for lastminute.com customers who need a room but are not near their PC. Whether away from the office, in the car, or on a train, they can now book hotels in destinations throughout the UK and Europe using advanced voice-recognition technology - for business or pleasure.

The voice-automated hotel reservation service will initially offer a selection of the best offers at over 1000 hotels in more than 50 UK cities and towns, and in the top 20 European cities including Rome, Paris, Amsterdam and Madrid. Callers simply speak their commands over the phone to the automated voice nicknamed ‘Chad’, which responds conversationally, giving details of what is available.

Quick and easy to use, the service should be able to tell customers what is available in less than 30 seconds, while complete booking will generally take under four minutes, including collecting credit card details and providing directions to the hotel. Customers will receive an automated confirmation via SMS or can have the full booking details spoken to them over the phone.

Brian Corbett, Chief Executive Officer at Broca Networks said: "Consumer acceptance of automated transactions is growing fast. Booking trips and making other transactions over the Internet is something people do without hesitating. What Broca does is to take this one stage further, linking the Internet with the telephone and through automated voice technology, we offer an additional channel to market for companies like lastminute.com".

lastminute.com chief executive officer Brent Hoberman said: "We believe voice recognition is a key component of our mission to serve the needs of customers at the last minute. We’re a digital commerce company and are able to leverage our strengths across all relevant consumer channels where we expect automated-voice to be of vital importance. This is the latest in a series of projects where we have demonstrated our sustained commitment to the development of innovative consumer retail channels and cost-effective business processes."

"This is an important building block in our strategy to best meet the needs of our customers on the move. There are exciting opportunities emerging in voice-automated and multimodal commerce and, step by step, we are putting in place the components needed for success" said Dominic Cameron, Director of VoiceWeb at lastminute.com. "Voice-recognition and synthetic speech technologies are making rapid progress and allowing us to envisage entirely new ways of meeting our customers' needs."

The Technology

The service uses VoiceXML, the emerging standard for voice-recognition applications throughout the world.

It is the first such consumer retail application to use both advanced speech recognition and 'text-to-speech' technologies. Customer phone calls are answered by Broca Networks voice interface platform where the caller’s speech is converted into text, which is then used to search for available inventory. The hotel offers are then spoken back to the customer by two voices. The first is a female broadcaster whose speech is concatenated to guide the caller, list hotels and give pricing information. The second uses speech synthesis technology with the 'synthetic male voice' reading descriptive information about the hotels. Many different technology systems at lastminute.com are linked together to run the service, including back office and customer service systems, telephone and SMS messaging servers and website databases.

Further information can be found at www.brocanetworks.com
Contact Clare Tidswell + 44 (0) 1223 370140

Notes to Editors

About Broca Networks Ltd
Broca's vision is to set the Internet free - the phone becomes a computer terminal that offers web based information "anywhere, anytime, from any device". Users are able to access a wide range of digital information quickly and conveniently, and enterprises can ensure efficient and timely communication with their customers and employees.

Broca is at the forefront of a growing trend to provide innovative speech interface solutions for Internet applications (the VoiceWeb), and for call centre enhancement. We deliver hosted services and applications to enable mobile users to retrieve a wide range of information from any phone, or from the emerging breed of hybrid phone/PDAs.

About lastminute.com
Based on the idea of matching supply and demand, lastminute.com offers consumers last minute opportunities to acquire airline tickets, hotel rooms, package holidays, entertainment tickets, restaurant reservations and delivery, specialty services, gifts and auctions in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Spain, The Netherlands, Australia and South Africa.

lastminute.com is the most visited website in the travel and tourism category across Europe according to a survey published in December 2001 by independent research company NetValue.