AppTek announces enhanced PlainSpeech automated speech recognition engine for Farsi and Urdu

AppTek, a leader in human language technology (HLT), has announced the addition of Farsi and Urdu automated speech recognition (ASR) engines to its PlainSpeech platform. The enhanced ASR engine also processes several other key languages such as Arabic and English, and is compatible for use with machine translation, providing a complete solution for customers without integration costs or complex development.

AppTek’s PlainSpeech Farsi and Urdu Broadcast and PlainSpeech Farsi Telephony engines are available to commercial customers and to the U.S. Government through AppTek’s GSA schedule.   

PlainSpeech Farsi telephony is a unique offering in the language technologies market because it is specifically engineered for the challenging content of unscripted natural language, dialect, noise and other aspects of non-broadcast environments. PlainSpeech Farsi and Urdu Broadcast are designed for news-oriented content from either television or radio and it readily processes broadcasts that include news, multi-speaker roundtable discussions and debates and even open-air interviews outside of the studio. 

Deployed for use in several commercial and government applications, as well as major commercial interactive voice response (IVR) programs, AppTek’s ASR technology has a proven track record of providing accuracy and speed, especially with dialects and challenging conversational environments.

AppTek’s Farsi ASR technology is the industry’s first solution to have been developed in parallel with a Hybrid Machine Translation  system for one platform that  can be seamlessly deployed  for many  translation,  knowledge discovery, multilingual information retrieval and  automated media monitoring.

“The benefits of the enhanced ASR engine go beyond traditional uses, as we are able to provide customers with mobile communications,” said Steve Cook, CTO at AppTek. “By utilizing the ASR engine through handheld devices, users are able to reap the benefits of the translation software where it makes the greatest impact, out in the field.”