Philips Electronics recently announced the availability of its SpeechPearl 8.0 software package. SpeechPearl 8.0 is the successor of the Philips' telephony speech engine SpeechPearl 2000, containing new functionality designed to ease application development and integration, increase accuracy and improve application usability. SpeechPearl helps enable IVR systems to understand natural speech through the spoken word. SpeechPearl's "open grammar" functionality helps allow natural language understanding for the caller and, at the same, easier application development for the system administrator. The support of both open and closed grammars within the same product was included to allow for flexibility and easier migration from a "closed grammar" application to an application with open scope. Developed for a range of telephony speech applications, from a few continuous numbers up to several million words vocabularies, SpeechPearl aims to provide more accurate speech recognition and understanding for human-like tele phony services.

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