Speech Technology Consulting

Cost Benefit Analysis
Projects undertaken have included analyses of the expected costs and potential benefits of implementing applications using speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies, including preparation of financial analyses and business cases necessary to obtain project funding.

Application Design and Application Acquisition
Projects have included designing and documenting callflows including scripts, vocabularies and response processing itself using analysis by confidence level, and enterprise computer interface design. Acquistition via a request for tender (RFT) using a tightly-written template and evaluation template using weighted scoring and NPV cost analysis has included the application design requiring vendors to quote for a working systm, not just licence fees.

Market Knowledge
The principal of Occidental Communications maintains a broad awareness of all vendors of speech recognition, text-to-speech and voice authentication software products around the world, a summary of which is listed in the vendor directories on this site.

Vendor Independence
Whether working on a consulting project, writing a piece for publication or compiling the vendors directories cited immediately above, Stephen Coates, the principal of Occidental Communications maintains strict vendor independence. RFTs, for example, are written to reflect the requirements of the client in question and to to seek capabilities some vendors would like to promote. RFTs managed by Stephen Coates for different clients have been won by a number of different vendors.


Vendor Directories

Directory of Speech Technology Vendors in Australia and New Zealand

International Speech Recognition Directory

International Text-to-speech Directory

International Voice Authentication Directory

International VoiceXML Software Developer Directory

Miscellaneous Speech Technology Directory


For a complete capability statement and history of recent projects, contact Occidental Communications, steve2008 [at] occidental.com.au


Articles and Papers on Speech Recognition

Speech Recognition Overview e-Access February, 2001

Speech Recognition - Developing the User Interface presented to the IBC Conference Voice 2001 August 2001

Speech Recognition vs DTMF eAccess November 2001

Speech Recognition Xephon [UK] November 2001

Raising the Bar of User Interface Design presented to the IBC Conference Voice 2002 March 2002

Speech Recognition: Separating the Application from the Machine Infinity Quarterly, June 2002



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