Cheltenham, England and Daejeon, Korea — August 7, 2006 — Novauris Technologies, a leading provider of core technology for voice-enabled access, and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Korea’s leading telecommunications research institute, today announced a long-term collaborative research agreement to develop and commercialize novel speech recognition technology for vehicle informatics systems and for spoken control of domestic robots. ETRI has pioneered information technology including wireless telecommunications and smart interfaces destined for markets in Korea and Japan, while Novauris has developed technology for rapid spoken selection of items from extremely large databases. This project aims to combine and extend the skill sets to produce new embedded applications.

“Our goal is to provide a user-friendly interface and improve accessibility and user experience for vehicle-informatics systems and intelligent robots, which are among the nine technologies for growth engines designated by the Korean Ministry of Information and Communication under the IT 839 strategy,” said Dr. Youngjik Lee, Director of Speech/Language Information Research Center at ETRI. “We chose Novauris as our research partner in this groundbreaking project because of their world-class research and engineering expertise in automatic speech recognition, and their unique approach to handling voice access to very large databases.”

The three-year research and development project, funded mainly by the Korean Ministry of Information and Communication, will focus on development of an embedded speech recognition system that can handle over 250,000 phrases in an active grammar. Applications will include single-utterance entry of destinations as addresses or points-of-interest for vehicle navigation, freeing drivers from the need for text input, and thus bringing advantages in safety and convenience. In addition, Korea and Japan lead the rest of the developed world in recognizing the potential of domestic robots in helping to care for an increasingly aging and isolated population. Novauris technology offers a special advantage here in its ability to accept spoken commands phrased in a wide variety of ways. During the research phase, the target language will be Korean, with other languages to follow during the commercialization stages.

“We’re excited about this opportunity to collaborate with ETRI in the area of large-scale speech recognition, which currently does not have a viable commercial solution for embedded platforms and applications,” said Yoon Kim, CEO of Novauris. “By combining ETRI’s expertise in Korean speech recognition for compact platforms with Novauris’s innovative approach to large-vocabulary speech recognition, we hope to make a significant contribution to the market acceptance and growth of vehicle infotainment systems and domestic robots.”

Novauris’s proprietary voice access technology, NovaSearch™, opens up the possibility of speech-enabling a wide range of tasks ranging from access to hundreds of millions of items such as names and addresses to command-and-control applications needing an informal, highly flexible interface. NovaSearch derives its power — power that allows direct access to 245 million items — mainly from its tight integration between speech recognition and database search.  In addition, the speech recognition in NovaSearch utilizes certain kinds of phonetic information, including aspects of syllable structure, that are normally ignored in conventional speech recognition.