Call center automisation : Acapela's innovative speech technology gives voice to Belgium's new EDA telephone enquiries ''13 13 ''.

Acapela Group, European leader in speech solutions, signed a contract to speech enable European Directory Assistance SA (EDA) Belgium 1313 service, confirming the value of the Acapela Telecom product line. 1313 can be dialled and accessed in French or in Dutch, 24/7, through both fixed and mobile telephone lines, and offers Belgians an efficient and complete telephone enquiry service.

Founded in 2003, EDA is the first competitor to enter the telephone enquiries market in Belgium. 1313 delivers all listed Belgian telephone numbers, the complete address of the correspondent, and also offers reversed search options. All results are read in real time, by Acapela's natural sounding high quality speech synthesis.

Integrating speech technology to services such as these illustrates the growing trend to automate at least part of call centre activities, thereby significantly increasing efficiency and quality, by reducing the time spent by tele-operators on the phone. This provides added value to work done by tele-operators, and improves the general image of the operator profession.

A technological achievement : giving voice to Belgium's linguistic specificities by using the advantages of Acapela's speech synthesis.

Acapela and EDA have combined their expertise to efficiently use speech synthesis and adapt this to specific Belgian linguistics. Meeting this technological challenge is a revolutionary breakthrough in telephone enquiries, which offers high prospects worldwide; this service can adapt to each country and regional specificity, providing users with a very clear and natural sounding synthesised telephone voice.

Because 1313 is able to properly manage two different languages, Acapela's English and Arabic voices could be used in the UK, to increase customer service by addressing the growing Arabic population. The melodic variations linked to each language pronunciation and accent, enable local users to easily comprehend the synthesised voice. Offering this service in more than one language allows operators to address the increasing multiculturalism in all countries.

This natural and flowing voice interface offers new and original services which show improved results, and represent European innovation. The specific Belgium example, which takes into account regional and country specificities, contributes to the quality of the Belgium 1313 service, and underlines Acapela's innovative speech synthesis, thereby highlighting the expertise and added value Acapela's linguistic team can provide worldwide.