The Clear Voice Of Success

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday October 22, 2008

Keeli Cambourne

EVERY time your satellite navigation system tells you where to turn, you can take heart in the fact the technology is an Australian innovation. And it's not just satnav systems to which Australia can lay claim.

Any technology using a voice-activated system relies upon technology developed by Australian company Appen, one of the world's leading commercial providers of sophisticated text, speech and language technology resources.

The privately owned company operates in seven countries, employing about 150 people. Its products, developed from a high-end fusion of linguistic and computer-science capabilities, cover speech recognition, speech synthesis (text-to-speech), automated language translation and natural language processing (computational linguistics) applications.

Its software works in 80 languages, 30 of which have been added in the past year.

While Appen has consistently exported between 90 per cent and 98 per cent of its products and services, the value of those exports has multiplied nine times since 2001.

In 2007-08 Appen's export figures rose 50 per cent.

One of its most exciting new releases has been the development, in conjunction with the US Government, of the Text Attribution Tool and Data Stream Profiling Tool, which allow advanced forensic analysis of electronic documents, including emails and text messages.