NSC Group will distribute and market a range of speech recognition products from local developer Inference in Australia and New Zealand under a partnership agreement reached today.
The group's chief executive Craig Neil said his firm would sell the Inference solutions either as standalone packages or part of a total solution.
"No-one out there is doing what Inference is doing. It has succeeded in developing products that are sophisticated, with high accuracy levels but at a price point that has opened up speech to organisations that previously would not have considered it," Neil said.
"It has [also] been successful despite the fact that the industry is still plagued by the poor reputation of earlier technology which had left many users cynical, cautious and in some cases badly burned."
Neil said Inference's "speedy" development lifecycles, "coupled with Inference's introduction of customisable, self managed, off-the-shelf products which are also available as a software as a service (SaaS)" had driven down the cost of buying next-generation speech recognition systems.
He believed Inference represented a good "cultural fit" with NSC.
"We're both privately owned Australian companies which are not bogged down by bureaucracy and are nimble enough to move as quickly as clients' business needs require," Neil said.
"While we're both small enough to be flexible, we're also large enough to be able to deliver and support large scale deployments."
Inference co-founder and director Kirsty McCarthy, claimed the firm's sales capability had "quadrupled" since it started bringing on channel partners last year.
Issue: 277 | March, 2010