Voice Of The Future

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday October 25, 2006

Appen

Winner: Information and Communication Technology

The friendly voice you hear on the car navigation system, your computer or even your mobile phone isn't some strange disconnected being from inside a computer chip on the other side of the world.

Chances are the dulcet tones emanating from the system come from Australia, and one of the many professional staff at Appen.

The Sydney-based company, started in 1996 by Julie Vonwiller and her husband Chris, is one of the largest suppliers of computer-based speech and language technology products in the world. And it recruits its specialty staff mainly from the greater Sydney area.

In just 10 years Appen has become the global leader in the quality and quantity of phonetic lexicons, speech databases and text, speech and handwriting processing products and services.

It is a mouthful, but anything to do with computerised linguistics is exactly what this company does best.

After starting a small research group into the emerging technology in 1996, Julie Vonwiller recognised the potential of computational linguistics - a marriage of computer science and linguistics - as a niche market not many companies had yet tapped into.

And even better, due to our multicultural society, the resources she had in Australia were probably better than anywhere else in the world.

"Our business is used in major companies in North America, Europe and Japan," says Vonwiller's husband and the company's general manager, Chris Vonwiller.

"Our success has been in picking up an emerging field and developing a deep expertise in our niche, which is a blend of computer science and linguistic excellence.

"We recruit the very best people from our universities, and they are really our key resource. We have the ability here in Australia and in Sydney to deal with different cultures and languages."

Appen exports 97 per cent of its business and one of its biggest breakthroughs has been in the US, where its sales have increased eightfold.

But English is just one of 50 languages that Appen works with and its products are used in countries as different as Pakistan, China, Croatia and India.

It has also diversified into working with some of the world's largest technology corporations, such as Microsoft, and undertaken extensive research and development into the highly competitive and emerging text-based technologies.

But Chris Vonwiller says none of the company's success could have been achieved without its staff and their commitment to putting out the best product available.

"We work in about 50 different languages, and also have specialised regional languages which many other companies do not consider," he says.

"We have a core team of about 40 professional staff and we employ up to 50 to 60 native speaker experts.

"That means if we are working on Hindi, we will have a whole Hindi team who are computer literate native speakers that use our software tools to help process data.

"And Sydney is the best city in the world to be able to do that with the vast array of cultures we have here."