TuVox CVR 4.0, announced Monday, expands a technology the company calls "SmartGen" to build speech dialogs, prompts and grammars in order to navigate data from SQL databases and Web services, said Steve Pollock, executive vice president and co-founder of TuVox Inc.

The new feature will allow call centers to use speech recognition to conduct automated transactions such as retrieving insurance claims data or ordering products, he said.

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TuVox CVR, which stands for Conversational Voice Response, already used SmartGen to speech-enable content from enterprise systems, such as product manuals.

The platform sits atop speech recognition engines such as those from Nuance Communications Inc. and ScanSoft Inc.'s SpeechWorks division and provides prebuilt functionality for developing and running speech applications for call centers, TuVox CEO Larry Miller said. It also helps bring speech applications to more enterprises by removing the need to do custom development, he said.

"By having the ability to deploy sophisticated speech applications that are equal to or better than an agent, customers will actually use the application," Miller said.

Click here to read about a partnership between IBM and Genesys on speech offerings.

The latest TuVox CVR release also adds a new feature called Predictive Recognition for testing and fine-tuning speech applications. It predicts words and phrases that might be misunderstood by a speech application before it is deployed to callers, Pollock said.

TuVox CVR 4.0 will be generally available in September. The Los Altos, Calif., company offers the software both in an enterprise license model and as a service. Pricing varies, but an average deployment can cost about $350,000, officials said.

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