Vicorp wins two out of the three categories at the recent "Voice Idol" competition at GForce 2007 hosted by Genesys Telecommunications at their event in London.

The Voice Idol concept was established by Genesys to acknowledge the growing importance of speech applications in everyday life and was viewed as an innovative way to showcase the latest applications. Speech recognition has taken time to be reliable enough for businesses to use but with technical standards such as Voice XML, which provides a standard way to program voice dialogues, rapid developments in speech solutions have brought speech recognition into the business mainstream. According to Datamonitor, companies spent $1.2 billion on such solutions in 2005, and this is forecast to grow by 22% a year to reach $3.2 billion by 2010.

Nine companies entered the 'Voice Idol' competition from seven different EMEA countries (UK, Ireland, Belgium, South Africa, Germany, Pakistan and France.)

The competition had three key categories:

• Financial Services/Healthcare: won by Vicorp
• Telco/Government/Utilities: won by D+S solutions
• Horizontal applications (eg. messaging, status, and locator): won by Vicorp

The winner of each category award was decided by a group of distinguished industry figures including Ri Pierce-Grove, Senior Analyst at Datamonitor and chaired by Tom Houwing, Founder and Director of voice-and-vision. The overall winner was voted for by the 900-strong audience at the G-Force conference, after viewing demonstrations by the category winners.

D+S solutions won overall with its application ACS-TC, which delivers automated voice services for telecommunications companies offering intelligent call steering functionality for the most common customer requests such as account status, shop-finder, address-change, etc.

Vicorp won their two category awards, firstly, for an identification and verification system targeted at Financial Services organisations and secondly, for a speech self service movie pay-per-view application.

"We find that the market is ready & now looking seriously at utilising speech self service especially when the applications are not only helpful to the actual users of the service, but also where they are beneficial in driving the business brand," stated Craig Ashmole, VP International Sales at Vicorp. "Speech applications will always be subjective, but it is about enabling the services to be flexible and easy to engage with both IT, and the marketing side of the business".

Vicorp's xMP simplifies the build, management and maintenance of customer facing speech recognition applications via an easy but powerful 'drag-and-drop' graphical user interface that enables the customer to tailor prompts, grammars or content delivered to the caller. xMP de-skills the process of service creation by shielding the user from code level complexities and fully supports reusability by allowing the user to create blocks of call flow logic that can then be packaged up and imported into future applications.

Lee Cottle, Vicorp's COO said, "We are delighted Vicorp was recognised by the evaluation board at 'Voice Idol' as an application development environment worth recognition. We continue to invest in developing our technology features that ease the task load and effort required by large complex clients, and in driving our rapid delivery solutions through our Professional Services capabilities with true application portability."