Capgemini and telisma win the New Usages Innovation Trophy awarded by Syntec Informatique and France Telecom
Telecom & Media France, an industry practice of Capgemini, and telisma, European leader in speech recognition, have won the New Usages Innovation Trophy for 2004.
14 March 2005
The Trophy was awarded on March 9th 2005 by France Telecom and Syntec Informatique, the French association of the software and computing services companies, which gathers more than 480 groups and companies and generate over 80% of the IT sector’s sales.
The competition, in its first year, aims to recognise the benefits of effective collaboration between IT and telecommunications and to encourage the development of new markets in the telecoms industry through the promotion of innovative solutions.
The prize was awarded to Capgemini and telisma for the My Contacts project for France Telecom, which was successfully launched in October 2004.
Laurent Balaine, CEO of telisma, said: “This prize represents an acknowledgment by the IT community of the innovative dimension of Capgemini and telisma’s solution, which has proven its industrial qualities through this large scale deployment. It also demonstrates its capacity to create new usages for the general public. This is proof that voice-activated technologies are mature enough for operators to be comfortable in using them as a development tool on a large scale.”
The solution
My Contacts is a new service for users that takes advantage of recent innovations
in technology to make voice-activated calling much more straight forward. The
voice-activated address book from France Telecom is France’s first fixed-line
service to enable users to access a personal address book from the fixed-line
via voice. To call someone, users dial 3001, say their first-name, surname or
nickname, and specify where contact should be reached, for example “Dad at home”,
“Claire on her mobile”; the network will then search for and directly dial the
number. The address book can be managed from a fixed line (vocal mode), over the
Internet on the France Telecom customer website (francetelecom.com) or by Minitel.
The Capgemini / telisma partnership
The strength of the Capgemini and telisma partnership was vital to the success
of the project and ultimately what secured the award. The two companies had worked
together on the successful implementation of the 3000 project, the first France
Telecom vocal service, and were confident that the teams would work together effectively
as a single unit to ensure the best results.
Capgemini consultants led the project and provided both solution integration and the vocal platform, telisma supplied the speech recognition technology and the specialised skills related to fine-tuning the application to fit France Telecom’s requirements, and France Telecom’s R&D practice supported the innovation in terms of creating new services.
Jean Bernot, Sales Development Director at Capgemini, added: “This project demonstrates the value of Capgemini’s Collaborative Business Experience approach. Thanks to a good dialogue and tight collaboration between the France Telecom, Capgemini and telisma teams, the project was delivered on time and an innovative solution was delivered to the client. The project offers real value to the end user.”
Technical innovation points
The speech technology implemented by telisma and integrated by Capgemini in My
Contacts represents a major innovation in several fields. In particular, this
is the first service of this scale to benefit from the dynamic speech recognition
data. The technology enables real-time voice recognition as the words that the
system analyses are only known at the time of the call, therefore taking into
account the modifications made by the user in their contact list on the Internet
in real time.
My Contacts is a forerunner to the fixed-mobile convergence solutions of the future, and delivers a service of great value to a new generation of users who have become familiar with voice commands and computerisation of their personal address books.
