Avaya Dialog Designer Receives Highest Overall Score in Speech Technology Magazine Evaluation

BASKING RIDGE, NJ--(Marketwire - April 6, 2009) - Avaya Inc., a leader in business communications, systems and applications, announced that Avaya Dialog Designer received the highest total score in a product evaluation of speech development tools conducted by SpeechTEK attendees and overseen by an independent judge selected by Speech Technology magazine. SpeechTEK is a leading speech technology event and Speech Technology magazine is a leading source of news and analysis on the speech technology industry.

In the results, released in the January/February 2009 issue of Speech Technology, evaluators measured speech self-service development tools from multiple vendors at SpeechTEK 2008. Avaya Dialog Designer received the highest score or tied for highest in every category, resulting in the highest overall score among all vendors tested. Other participating vendors included Cisco, Envox, Loquendo, and Voxeo.

Avaya Dialog Designer is an open-standards based development tool for the Avaya Voice Portal speech self-service solution. Based on the widely accepted Eclipse development framework, Dialog Designer offers a drag-and-drop environment for development and maintenance of speech and touch-tone applications.

"Speech development tools are essential to bringing next generation speech applications to the forefront of customer service and employee communications," said David Myron, editorial director, Speech Technology magazine. "In our most recent hands on evaluations, Avaya Dialog Designer consistently rated at the top in four key criteria, gaining the highest overall score, and demonstrating its commitment to excellence in speech technology."

Test evaluators highlighted Avaya Dialog Designer's open standards capabilities, describing its ability to "layer on top of the Eclipse application development platform, a highly developed, extremely popular open-source tool." It also made special mention of Avaya Dialog Designer's Call Control eXtensible Markup Language (CCXML) output, which is designed to provide telephony call control support for dialog systems, such as VoiceXML.

In addition to speech development tools, Speech Technology magazine also conducted hands-on evaluations on multi-modal applications. Evaluators praised an application that Avaya developed for purchasing flowers, describing it as "an excellent use of multi-modality because buying something as visual as flowers is extremely difficult with a voice-only interface." The application was hailed for its 'usability,' along with its ability to display voice menu prompts visually on the screen, making it easy for users to decide what can be said.

"This winning score reinforces Avaya's strategy in self service, since it comes directly from the users and experts in the speech technology field," said Bob Lyons, general manager and vice president of Avaya's contact center division. "Avaya will continue to tap the full potential of automated customer care technologies in order to help businesses enhance customer service across all levels, while gaining new cost-efficiencies."

Further Information on Avaya Dialog Designer:

The new version of Avaya's speech development tool -- Avaya Dialog Designer 5.0 -- is available now globally with Avaya Voice Portal 5.0. It features new enhancements that further streamline authoring, simulation, and deployment of voice and video applications. An additional functional enhancement allows developers to create their own integrations, such as packaging complex Web services or integrating systems which do not support Web services, via a Pluggable Data Connector.

Avaya Dialog Designer is provided at no cost with Avaya Voice Portal and Interactive Response systems, and is downloadable free from the Avaya DevConnect site.

For more information on the SpeechTek and Speech Technology magazine evaluation, please visit www.speechtechmag.com.

For more information on Avaya Dialog Designer or Avaya Voice Portal, please visit www.avaya.com

About Avaya

Avaya is a global leader in enterprise communications systems. The company provides unified communications, contact centers, and related services directly and through its channel partners to leading businesses and organizations around the world. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and competitiveness. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.

About Speech Technology Magazine

Speech Technology magazine is recognized worldwide as the leading source of news, information, and analysis for the speech technology industry. The magazine also administers and hosts the annual SpeechTEK conference. Each of these properties is designed to serve the buyers, builders, and implementers of speech technology. For more information about the magazine, its editorial calendar, or speech technology in general, please visit us on the Web at http://www.SpeechTechMag.com. For more information about the SpeechTEK conference, visit http://www.SpeechTEK.com. SpeechTechMag.com (which is updated daily), SpeechTEK.com, and the magazine are properties of Information Today, Inc.

Contact Information: Avaya Contact: Jonathan Varman 908 953 6432 jvarman@avaya.com