Nu Echo Blog

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.

The Nu Echo team is pleased to announce the release of a new beta version of NuGram IDE.

Highlights

In addition to a number of bug fixes, the following features have been added, in response to specific requests from users:

• Grammar content. The type of a grammar (XML, ABNF, GSL) can be associated with specific filename extensions to help the tools properly load grammars. For instance, while the Nuance OSR engine uses the “.gram” extension to designate compiled grammars, this extension is customarily used to designate ABNF grammars with the IBM WebSphere Voice Server recognition engine. The ability to change file extension associations facilitates the use of NuGram IDE in various environments.
• Translation rules. A very flexible, project-specific mechanism has been added to control how external rule references are interpreted by the various tools (debugging tools, conversion tools, etc.). For example, references to external .abnf grammars (references of the form $<path/grammar.abnf>) can be automatically converted to references of the form $<path/grammar.grxml> at grammar conversion time. Or references to a compiled .gram SLM grammar can be replaced by a reference to a simple ABNF grammar at grammar development time, without having to change the source grammar.
• Enhanced automatic builder. It is now possible to specify an output folder for the generated XML/GSL grammars, as well as which folders contain the grammars to convert. By putting generated grammars in specific folders, the folders containing the source ABNF grammars do not get polluted by derived resources (that are usually not put under source control - CVS, SVN, and the like since they can be re-created from the source grammar). This also makes it easier to package grammars for the application - the application build process can simply copy a single directory structure without first having to remove some files.
• Configurable validations. The feedback level of some validation issues can now be configured in the preferences.
• Enhanced GSL export/conversion. When exporting/converting grammars to GSL, the resulting grammars are now much better formatted.
• Better conformance with SRGS. Several conformance problems have been fixed.
• Nuance 9 extensions. The tools can be configured to support the Nuance 9 extensions to SISR (SWI properties).
• LumenVox extensions. The tools can be configured to properly handle LumenVox phonetic spellings.
• SISR 2004 Working Draft support. The tools can be configured to support the SISR 2004 Working Draft syntax for rule variables.This feature is especially useful for grammar developers targeting the IBM WebSphere Voice Server recognition engine, which doesn’t support the latest version of the SISR specification.

Download now!

We strongly encourage people to download this new version as soon as possible as it contains many important new features and bug fixes. And as usual, we solicit your feedback to help improve our product and better support your grammar development process.

The Nu Echo team is pleased to announce the release of a new beta version of NuGram IDE.

Highlights

In addition to a number of small bug fixes, the following features have been added, in response to specific requests from users:

• Unified editor. The ABNF and coverage editors have been merged in a single, multi-tab editor.
• Improved refactoring tools.  The refactoring tools have been enhanced to better support semantic tags. For example, semantic slots can now be renamed. Also, the rule extraction refactoring properly adjusts semantic tags.
• GSL Importer. Nuance GSL grammars can now be translated to ABNF.
• Better encoding detection. The environment now uses the proper Eclipse mechanism to detect the encoding of an ABNF file.
• Comments preservation for imported grammars. When converting grammars from XML form or GSL to ABNF, comments are preserved.
• Project/folder publishing. Whole grammar hierarchies can be uploaded to a NuGram Server at once. See the online documentation for more details.

NuGram Hosted Server improvements

We also recently upgraded the NuGram Hosted Server with support for the following features:

• Complete HTTPS support. The login and registration process is now done via secured pages to help protect privacy. Also, the NuGram Server HTTP API now fully supports HTTPS.
• Grammar Content viewing. Grammars published on the server can be previewed from the grammar browsing page. Just click on a grammar name and see the grammar source code!
• Account settings. A new Account page let you manage your account settings.

Download now!

We strongly encourage people to download this new version as soon as possible as it contains many important new features and bug fixes (and the previous version will expire on November 1st, anyway, while the new release will expire on April 1st, 2009). And as usual, we solicit your feedback to help improve our product and better support your grammar development process.