Avaya Acquires UK Speech Technology Company AurixAvaya Acquires UK Speech Technology Company Aurix

Avaya's challenge will be to package Aurix's sophisticated technology in a cost-effective and easily-deployable fashion.

Avaya announced today that it has acquired privately-held and UK-based Aurix. Aurix brought 30 years of expertise in intelligence-grade speech recognition technology to the commercial world when it was founded in 2005. The Aurix phonetic audio search engine is a direct descendant of a speech recognition capability originally developed for the UK Ministry of Defence, which has been refined and developed over that 30-year period.

The core differentiator of the Aurix technology is described as supporting the real-time identification, searching and data mining of huge volumes of audio and audio-visual material without the need for massive computer power. Compared to traditional systems for audio data mining, Aurix is said to be able to "ingest" audio data at speeds up to 80 times faster than real-time, and conduct searches at speeds up to 80,000 times faster than real-time. To put that in context, if my arithmetic is correct, that would mean the recording of a two hour conference call could be searched for specific words or phrases in 5.4 seconds.

In terms of commercializing its speech technology, Aurix says it has developed solutions for four key sectors: the contact center, data search, security and intelligence and IT security. It is the potential in the contact center that clearly has the most immediate appeal for Avaya, highlighted in the press release by Avaya's SVP for Corporate Development, Strategy, and Innovation, Brett Shockley. The Aurix phonetic speech search engine is said to be able to allow call quality monitoring and reviewing in real time, so that it is possible to identify problems, trends and revenue opportunities as they happen. The graphic below shows a dashboard including elements of a script in an insurance application. It comes from the Aurix Cloud based Analyst application.

Much of the Aurix website, and press articles gleaned from a fairly exhaustive search, talk more about the potential of the Aurix technology as opposed to success it has seen in actual commercial deployment. How does the Aurix technology compare to the word-spotting capability of Interaction Analyzer, being delivered this quarter in the 4.0 release of Customer Interaction Center by Interactive Intelligence? Avaya's challenge will be to package Aurix's sophisticated technology in a cost-effective and easily-deployable fashion.