Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

And the new entrant - Gabrielle – is hoping to be a smash hit. Gabrielle supplies a web middleware platform that combines the naturalness of voice control with the visual richness of a graphical display. The result is an interface with radically improved ease of use for the consumer and an environment that allows application developers to easily merge the dual media of voice and web.

With consumers and the workforce increasingly requiring access to information and services when on the move or from terminals without proper keyboards, usability has become a real issue. On-screen data entry has been so difficult that many tasks have simply not been viable. As a partial solution, organisations have turned to voice automation, installing millions of ports of interactive voice response (IVR) equipment to complement their web presence.

The Gabrielle platform brings these previously independent channels together to deliver a rich user experience, where audio feedback supplements the graphical display and voice input takes the burden out of filling in forms.

Gabrielle’s customers will be organisations which operate web sites (or supply web infrastructure to those who do) particularly for interaction with their audiences rather than simple browsing and information dissemination. What Gabrielle offers them is not a new application, but rather an OSS/service management component which gives companies the ability to extend the range of viable applications which they can offer on their existing infrastructure.

The Gabrielle product is applicable to a wide range of markets:-

• Interactive TV allows use of the telephone to overcome the limitations of the remote control

• Mobile internet voice control makes transactional web applications usable on mobile devices

• Web callcentres bringing voice automation to web collaboration leads to increased self service

• Mobile gaming enabling multi-user gaming across the diversity of voice and data devices

• Workforce management raising the efficiency of the mobile worker through enhanced usability

Gabrielle provides the opportunity to vastly improve the user experience of conducting ‘transactions’ on the web. This translates into companies being able to extend the value to be derived from the online - enhanced revenue opportunities and reduced costs.

New revenue streams also become possible from the launch of applications which could not previously be offered due to the limitations of the terminals’ interfaces. Gabrielle supports true ‘multimodality’ - the simultaneous combination of voice and graphical input - using technology protected by 10 patents and patents pending.