Recent Press Releases

MAAF VIE CUSTOMERS CAN MANAGE THEIR ACCOUNT BY PHONE 24/7 VIA VOICEXML AND TEXT TO SPEECH.

"MAAF Vie", a division of MAAF Assurances, a leading French insurance group, relies on a solution combining the Idylic VoiceXML Gateway and Elan Sayso™ text to speech to optimise the processing of customer calls and provide them with 24/7 hassle free access to their life insurance contract.

Toulouse (France), 12th May 2003 - It's the first time a VoiceXML server has ever been used in France to handle such a "critical" customer service. The application developed by MAAF substitutes agents to allow its customers to access financial information on their life insurance contract. Elan Sayso™ text to speech reads any dynamic information (figures, punctual messages) loudly, clearly and in real time, liberating the organisation from heavy studio recording constraints. MAAF Vie members will be able to access their portfolio 24/7.

This service is a new step for MAAF Assurances, which already equipped its call center in Bordeaux (South West France) with Idylic's VoiceXML Phonic Corporate gateway in '02. MAAF Assurances also integrated Elan Sayso™ text to speech to its internal email reading platform.

"We were already convinced by Idylic's Phonic Corporate solution based on the VoiceXML language, of which we have been testing the efficiency and reliability for the past year. We have also successfully integrated Elan Sayso™ to our internal email reading by phone solution. We were therefore fully confident when we committed ourselves to this new project with Idylic and Elan Speech" explains Jean-François Godet, MAAF Assurances IVR Project Manager.

The deployment of Elan Sayso™ on such a "critical" application confirms the jump-off quality point reached by Elan Speech's technology and its ability to relay the human voice and contribute to the deployment of new services.

In addition to accessing their life insurance contract details, now made available 24 hours a day, MAAF Vie customers can request to be put in touch with an agent. All the customer qualification information collected by the VoiceXML application are transmitted to the call center agent's screen, thanks to Phonic Corporate's native interface to Genesys CTI software.

The solution took Nextira One, MAAF Assurances Group's main integrator, less than 3 months to deploy.
To access the MAAF Vie voice service, MAAF Vie customers can call +33 549 176 767.

About VoiceXML
The VoiceXML (VXML) language has been validated as a standard by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) as an equivalent of HTML for deploying voice-enabled services over the phone. Developers can use standard web environment tools to develop VoiceXML applications, and like the web, the application server and the browser can be split over the network. Thanks to this, new generation voice services based on VoiceXML are more flexible, portable and open than traditional IVR services.

VoiceXML Gateway will quickly replace all the old generation IVR systems that are based on proprietary languages.

Telecom Operators have deployed VoiceXML solutions for some time. Now it's the Corporate and Call Center market that is gradually taking advantage of VoiceXML for their own needs.

About MAAF Vie
With over 6400 employees in 535 agencies serving more than 3 million clients, MAAF Assurances is a leading French insurance group.

MAAF Vie is the life insurance subsidiary of MAAF Assurances. It claims 270 000 customers and 3,2 billion euros of managed funds.
http://www.maaf.fr/

About Idylic
Idylic is a leading Voice platform editor in Europe specialized in VoiceXML solutions.
Phonic Corporate is a flexible, open and competitive VoiceXML platform enabling deployment of all types of value added voice services for the Corporate and Call Center Market. Phonic Telecom is the carrier-grade scalable solution for VoiceXML deployments in the Telecom Operator and Voice Service Provider environments.

Integrating best of breed voice technologies and advanced call control features, Phonic is also the ideal environment for Idylic partners to develop and deploy advanced and targeted voice applications for Corporate and Telecom markets.

Headquartered in Toulouse, France, Idylic was founded in 2000 by a team of voice and internet technology specialists. It brings a reliable and professional solution range to the European VoiceXML Platform market.

Since 2001, many customers in EMEA have deployed Idylic's solutions in Corporate and Telecom environments. These include : MAAF Assurances, EDF (French power-supply provider), Hewlett Packard, Completel, Environment Ministry, Lille University, and several mobile subsidiaries of the Orange and France Telecom group.
http://www.idylic.com/

About Elan Speech
As a leading world player in Text to Speech (TTS), Elan Speech focuses exclusively on the development and marketing of natural-language interfaces. By analysing their customers' needs and how best to meet them, Elan Speech brings organisations new ways of interacting with their clients, providing new opportunities to speech-enable their world through revenue-generating applications.
Elan TTS is the automatic production of speech, through a computer-based system able to read any text aloud. It is deployed worldwide across multimedia applications, wireless and mobile devices, Internet, telecom and automotive systems.
TTS speech-enables services and applications such as voice portals, voice emails, unified messaging, talking web, interactive games, educational software or navigation systems.
In designing technology that fully exploits the richness of a speaker's intonations, the company has developed high quality TTS, Elan Sayso™. Elan's voices not only speak intelligibly but contain all the emotion, nuances and variety of delivery that people use to convey meaning.
Since Elan's debuts in 1986, the company's multi-lingual TTS products have been deployed across a wide range of revenue-earning applications by hundreds of organisations worldwide.
These include : Alcatel, Atos Origin, Bosch Blaupunkt, BVRP, CAE, Cegetel, Daimler Chrysler, Harmann Becker, Intervoice, Magnetti Marelli, Navtech, Oki, PSA, Siemens, Support Comm, Tecnomen, Temic, Unisys, Vivendi Universal Publishing, etc.
http://www.elanspeech.com/