Nu Echo Blog

Together with the introduction of NuGram Server Free Developer Edition, the Nu Echo team is pleased to announce that it also releases NuGram IDE 2.2. With this new release, designing and testing dynamic grammars has never been easier.

The most important feature introduced in this release is the support for Java to populate dynamic grammars. When using NuGram IDE, you use the exact same code to test and tune your grammar that will run in production, but without the long deployment cycle associated with stopping, deploying and restarting a Java web application. And deploying your grammars in NuGram Server is as simple as deploying JSP pages.

The free Basic Edition can be downloaded directly from within your Eclipse environment. Simply follow the download instructions. Or contact us for the Professional Edition.

The Nu Echo team is proud to announce the availability of NuGram 2.1.

The noteworthy new features in this release are:

• Enhanced sentence generation tool (NuGram IDE)
  The sentence generation algorithm has been further improved and a new strategy (Rule examples) has been added. Sentences can now be generated from specific sentence patterns. Also, the generation process can be stopped.
• New sentence explorer (NuGram IDE)
  The user interface of the sentence explorer has been completely changed. It is now much more intuitive and easy to use. It also allows sentence patterns to be added to the sentence generation tool.
• Semantic interpretation optimizations
  All supported semantic tag languages based on ECMAScript have been optimized (compiled scripts are now properly cached). This dramatically increases the performance of the coverage test tool.
• Complete rewrite of the underlying parsing algorithm
  The algorithm that matches sentences with the grammar rules has been completely rewritten. It is now much more efficient, in terms of speed and memory consumption.
• Post-processing API (NuGram Server SDK / Professional Edition only)
  NuGram Server now provides an API to implement and deploy application-specific post-processing routines.
• Initial support for different target ASR engines (NuGram IDE)
  It is now possible to specify the target ASR engine in the preferences. This affects the way words in grammars are normalized, and also how grammars are converted to GrXML.
• Small enhancements to the ABNF dynamic grammar templating language
  The templating language now supports new forms, like optional grammar headers.
• Many small improvements and bug fixes

The free Basic Edition can be downloaded directly from within your Eclipse environment. Simply follow the download instructions. Or contact us for the Professional Edition.

Please, let us know what you think of these new features!

Ever wanted to get access to an easy to use and affordable platform for your automated IVR tests?

Today, the Nu Echo team is delighted to announce the general availability of the NuBot Platform to the developer community, following a successful beta period that ended on November 30th.

With the NuBot Platform, you can:

• Get a free copy of the NuBot Integrated Testing Environment (ITE), a powerful Eclipse-based environment for developing test scripts of any complexity, managing tests, and performing extensive analysis of test results.
• Run tests, small or large, using the NuBot Hosted Service, and only have to pay for your actual use of the service.

While hosted IVR testing services have been available for some time, NuBot is unique in giving away all the tools required in order to be in complete control of the entire testing process. This provides you with the best of both worlds: Complete autonomy and access to an on-demand platform to execute your tests.

To quote Andreas Volmer, Presales Manager EMEA at Voxeo VoiceObjects:

“I found NuBot easy to master and a very powerful addition to my automated testing portfolio. I can only recommend to get your hands on it and try it; it’s about time that we take automated testing more seriously in the IVR application business.”

Sounds interesting? Make sure to visit the product page at http://www.nuecho.com/nubot.

Two months after launching NuGram IDE Basic Edition, the Nu Echo team is proud to announce the general availability of NuGram IDE Professional Edition, as well as NuGram Server. You can read the official press release here.

We are also simultaneously releasing an update of NuGram IDE Basic Edition, providing many minor enhancements and bug fixes. Simply follow the download instructions.

NuGram IDE Professional Edition

Targeted at serious developers and professional services organizations with rigorous development processes, NuGram IDE Professional Edition offers all the features of the Basic Edition, plus:

• A collection of advanced features that provide significant added value and further increase development productivity and grammar quality.
• All the batch tools required in order to support application build processes or scheduled grammar update processes.
• A development version of NuGram Server, which makes it possible to test dynamic grammars with any speech application.
• Access to the download site, upgrades, and support tickets.

NuGram Server

NuGram Server is a robust and scalable engine that offers runtime services to speech-enabled applications through a simple HTTP-based protocol. Its architecture makes it readily usable by all speech-enabled applications, as well as text applications. It also offers flexible control over grammar caching strategies to optimize the use of ASR resources. NuGram Server currently supports the following services:

• Instantiation and generation - Using this service, dynamic grammars are instantiated and converted to the desired format (ABNF, GrXML, etc.).
• Interpretation - Using this service, textual sentences are parsed using static or dynamically-generated grammars and the resulting semantic interpretation is returned.

Support and feedback

You have some questions? You want to give us feedback? We’d like to hear from you! Send all your inquiries to nugram-support@nuecho.com. You can also interact with us on Twitter.

Following a 6-month beta program involving hundreds of users worldwide, the Nu Echo team is proud to announce the general availability of NuGram IDE Basic Edition. For those of you who are using NuGram IDE Beta, you should update now because the beta version expires on April 1st.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all beta users out there for their feedback on the various beta versions of NuGram IDE. Not only have you allowed us to make the Basic Edition a much better product, but you have contributed to making NuGram IDE the most widely used grammar development environment ever.

We’re extremely proud of the fact that people have been successfully using NuGram IDE for grammar development targeting a wide variety of speech recognition technologies (including Nuance GSL, Nuance OSR, Loquendo, IBM, LumenVox, and even Microsoft), as well as in conjunction with an even wider variety of VoiceXML service creation environments (including VoiceObjects, Cisco Unified Call Studio, openVXML, Nortel SCE, Avaya Dialog Designer, several Eclipse-based environments, and many others). This truly confirms NuGram’s status as the universal grammar platform for speech - and even text - applications.

NuGram IDE Basic Edition is available free of charge and can now be downloaded directly from the NuGram site (now that the Beta period is over, no registration is required to install it). The complete documentation is also fully available online.

More to come really soon!

The availability of NuGram IDE Professional Edition and NuGram Server will be announced separately in the upcoming weeks. NuGram IDE Professional Edition will introduce many new exciting features that dramatically accelerate the writing, debugging, and testing of speech grammars, all features that will rapidly become invaluable to serious grammar developers and professional service organizations. NuGram Server will add optional runtime capabilities to the platform. It will for instance make it possible to generate grammars on-the-fly based on application data or to semantically interpret text sentences, a feature that has been shown to be quite effective for text-based dialog applications such as instant messaging or SMS.

Stay tuned!

Finally, expect some cool, community-oriented features to be added soon to Hosted NuGramServer.

Support and feedback

You have some questions? You want to give us feedback? We’d like to hear from you! Send all your inquiries to nugram-support@nuecho.com. You can also follow us on Twitter.