Amplittude

Several weeks of obscure work....and good news

2011-09-19T19:55:00.000+02:00

We've been for several weeks working at the back office, in our product suite, and we 're very optimistic on the results. We've been creating a complete framework for voice integration and treatment, based in mcrpv2 standards.

On the business side, some good news. Analysts are forecasting triple digit growth in the speech technologies market for the next years.

http://www.speechtechblog.com/2011/02/17/speech-eyes-fourfold-growth-in-four-years

Some excerpts:

...good news from Global Industry Analysts (GIA), a research firm covering the speech technology industry. The firm is projecting the speech industry to reach a global total of $20.93 billion by 2015, up from $5.2 billion at the end of 2009

The recession induced the dire need to prune down costs at call centers, which prompted many to shine the spotlight on speech recognition. The technology is rapidly migrating from the early adopter’s stage to mass-market customer service organizations, with compelling cost advantages offering a strong business case. According to GIA, the technology right now is “flaunting the potential to shore up approximately 90 percent of the cost of a call by eliminating the intervention of customer service agents. This advantage stands tall against a scenario of dwindling client bases, shrinking credit availability, intensifying competition, downsizing of outsourcing projections, and cold-eyed client focus on cost savings,”

Well, I hope so...

From SpeechtechMag

2010-12-02T22:25:00.006+01:00

The Voice in the Cloud
New offerings put anything and everything into the clouds.
By Veeru Ramaswamy - Posted Nov 5, 2010

What is "voice in the cloud," with the operative word being “cloud?”
Voice and speech communications have existed and evolved for more than a century. From legacy plain old telephone service (POTS), public switched telephone networks (PSTN), and integrated services digital networks (ISDN), to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks and speech applications, the trend for speech is to become more network-centric rather than to move towards the edge or client devices, particularly in-the-cloud, so to speak. With the omnipresence of IP networks and data centers, speech has become no different than text and video with respect to communications and networks. “Cloud” itself comes from the architecture diagrams to represent Enterprise PSTN telephony or IP networks. These days, “cloud” refers more to the enterprise IP network than the PSTN network due to the vast prevalence of IP networks for voice, video, data, and control applications and communications.
With the advent of IP networks, VoIP application protocols such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and H.323 became extremely popular in the past decade, with SIP gaining a lot more popularity due to its simple XML-type data structure (and hence obvious utility in the cloud), and being part of the admired IP multimedia subsytem(IMS) systems in wireless and cable infrastructures. More and more unified communications applications are exploiting the convergence of data and voice applications such as chat, IM, and presence with protocols such as eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol(XMPP) to provide a seamless, multimodal voice and data service to the end users. This convergence of voice and data service has given birth to new and improved services for the end users, such as visual voicemail service that could contain a transcribed text with the use of speech recognition engines. Other examples of voice services in the cloud, to name a few, can include access to presence information or location information by using voice inputs, posting voice messages on social media and networking sites.
With prevalence of cloud-computing, every solution is becoming more of a XaaS, meaning “anything-as-a-service.” Started initially with SaaS, Software as a Service, things such as PaaS (Platform as a Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) have become a common practice for hardware, software, and networking infrastructure providers. For instance, call center recording and analytics providers and dictation and transcription providers such as Transcription Service Operators, have all adopted the concept of hosted solutions or cloud-computing. From media industries to others, such as voice-to-text applications and services, it has always been the case that media/content such as voice, video, and data was produced and consumed “as-a-service” irrespective of software, hardware, or infrastructure.
Voice over data communications has naturally trended the voice applications to become network-centric, with recording, storage, transmission, recognition, search, analytics, and other actions performed in centralized or distributed data servers in a hosted environment. Of course this leads to the more fundamental question as to the security of voice content (i.e. encryption methods for protecting user data and privacy) and methods of provisioning and authenticating the users using OSS/BSS (Operational Support/Business Support) systems in large IP network “clouds.”

A new project is (almost) born.

2010-12-02T21:07:00.002+01:00

Amplittude is a leading provider of advanced open source speech technologies and solutions: voice recording and indexing for unified communications platforms, enterprise rich-content management and search platforms,multichannel and multimodal processes and user interfaces. Our state-of-the-art VOX family of products integrate in enterprise SOA architectures, or can be delivered as Saas.
We believe open source simply produces higher quality software. When lots of people collaborates, the best technology is made. This occurs among an Internet-connected, worldwide community where new ideas and code are shared.

Cloud company or Cloud-based company?

2010-07-03T18:02:00.000+02:00

Both.

It seems that we are a Cloud Company because we are designing and building solutions that will use and leverage cloud based computing. Public clouds, like Amazon, Google App Engine, Azure, etc, and private clouds. In fact we want to design and build solutions that run in mainstream IT platforms, and in a short term cloud computing will be (is) the mainstream platform.

But we're also a Cloud-based Company because we've envisioned our company as a new class of firms who use 100% based internet (and mostly cloud) tools to make any location their office. That is, companies who don’t need a physical office where employees physically gather to do work.

Eventually we will have physical offices, but we'd like to think about them as 80% meeting and living rooms, the place where we will socialize with our team and partners.

More to come, as vision becomes reality...

Going live....

2010-06-15T18:00:00.000+02:00

We've decided to publish our website, www.amplittude.com, knowing that there is some (quite a lot!!) work pending until having the first alpha-release of the VOX platform we are building. We'll like to have our first version of the Search VOX platform briefly, possibly with the new year.

We've made the website using open source products (thanks Vosao GAE CMS!!), and google app engine hosting, and our conclusions are that if you know what you do they're great platforms (both Vosao and GAE) with poor documentation.

On the product development side, we've create a forge to support our development work (forge.amplittude.com), again based in great Codendi Open Source Platform. If you liked how Sourceforge was 4 or 5 years ago, you'll feel at home. We do. Have said that is hosted in an Amazon (free) cloud instance?

More coming soon...