Idea offers speech recognition services

Idea Cellular Limited, a leading cellular operator in the country, has launched yet another innovative feature in its value-added services.

Now, Idea's two million users across the five circles will be able to access value-added services by simply dialing 456 and speaking into their cell phones.

"Value addition is all about making the user-experience easier and richer. With this new technology, we anticipate a huge interest for accessing many innovative services that are being offered by Idea," said Vikram Mehmi, the CEO of Idea Cellular, in a press release.

"This new system is a speech recognition tool that accepts spoken English with Indian accents and allows the users to place voice commands to access the service. A simple and easy way to access a variety of services like ringtones, cricket, news, jokes etc, makes the mobile experience more interesting and fun. It will enable easier access to many subscribers, who are not comfortable with the keypad, SMS, or the small display screen of the mobiles," said the press release.

The voice-activated service allows the users to access through a speech command instead of an SMS, he said.

The value-added services will also be available to Idea subscribers across the country at Rs 4.99 a minute. The range of services include news, cricket, ringtones, musicard, movies, jokes, logos, horoscopes and stocks.

"456 service is very easy to use. To illustrate, in order to hear news, the Idea subscriber will require just dialing 456 and saying 'News'. The interactive speech-recognition system will take the caller directly to the various news options," the release said.