Alcatel's Genesys to acquire VoiceGenie to move to more flexible Voice XML software standards
The combination will give it nearly 25 percent of the market, more than twice the size of its closest competitor.
According to recent Gartner/Dataquest estimates, VoiceGenie is number two in market share position, with Genesys in number one position. The combination of both companies will make Alcatel's Genesys the undisputed leader in a fast-developing market that is expected to double in the next three years, with nearly one-fourth of the market, almost two and a half times the size of its nearest competitor. Genesys expects to accelerate the trend away from legacy, proprietary IVRs (interactive voice response) to new Voice XML software standards. In addition, Genesys will expand its offerings for Service Providers allowing them to deploy a wide variety of internal and network services, including managed services.
"The increased adoption of speech recognition provides a strong driver for companies to replace aging proprietary IVR systems with the standards-based voice portal systems," Gartner Analyst Drew Kraus wrote in a recent report. "In addition, vendors announced end-of-life plans for their proprietary IVR systems, causing some companies to accelerate their plans to replace these systems."
"We believe the market wants to see a clear leader emerge that is dedicated to standards-based solutions that make it easier and faster to deploy speech-enabled applications," said Thomas Charlton, VoiceGenie president and CEO. "Together with Genesys, we will build the market leader, with global scale, and establish Voice XML as a universal platform."
American depositary shares rose 28 cents to $16.40 in morning trading (April 5th) on the New York Stock Exchange.
[Source: http://www.businessweek.com/]
[See also:
http://www.genesyslab.com/]
A revised Turing Test to merit
the label "thinking"
What else would a computer need to pass the Turing Test ?
Clearly, it would have to have an excellent command of language, with all its quirks and oddities. Crucial to being sensitive to those quirks is taking account of the context in which things are said. But computers cannot easily recognize context. What makes context so important is that it supplies background knowledge.
Background knowledge, in fact, is useful in all kinds of ways, because it reduces the amount of computational power required. Logic is not enough to correctly answer questions such as "Where is Sue's nose when Sue is in her house?" Trying to write software that accounts for every possibility quickly leads to what computer scientists call "combinatorial explosion."
Imagine we could program a computer with all possible conversations of a certain finite length. Such a computer, New York University philosopher Ned Block says, would have the intelligence of a toaster, but it would pass the Turing Test. One response to Block's challenge is that the problem he raises for computers applies to human beings as well.
Setting aside physical characteristics, all the evidence we ever have for whether a human being can think is the behavior that the thought produces.
A similar line of discussion--the Chinese Room Argument--was developed by philosopher John Searle of the University of California, Berkeley, to show that a computer can pass the Turing Test without ever understanding the meaning of any of the words it uses.
Could computers ever come to understand what the symbols mean? Computer scientist Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton in England believes they could, but like people, computers would have to grasp abstractions and their context by first learning how they relate to the real, outside world.
[More on:
http://www.sciammind.com/]