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Home arrow Investor Relations arrow RNS Announcements arrow 2004 arrow Eckoh Awarded 3 Year Age Verification Contract by 02
Eckoh Awarded 3 Year Age Verification Contract by 02    13/12/04 Print E-mail
Eckoh Technologies plc (“Eckoh”), Europe’s leading speech application speech provider, has been awarded a 3 year contract to provide a user interface for age verification and parental control services from O2, a leading provider of mobile communications services.

O2 are introducing age verification to ensure that commercial content services classified as 18 are only available to users who are old enough. Users will only be able to access these services if they have been successfully age verified.

To verify their age, users will be able to dial an advanced speech recognition (ASR) service developed by Eckoh and hosted on their market leading call processing platform. The system will initially identify the caller by their mobile number and will use ASR to collect the details required from the caller to perform age verification to O2’s robust standard. On successful verification, the service will update the profile held by O2 to enable them to access content and services classified as 18.

The system will also provide a simple way for users to configure O2’s new parental control service. Parental control is designed to help parents ensure the safety of their children by restricting access to Internet sites available through mobiles. This will be the first part of the solution provided by Eckoh to be delivered and will launch in December 2004.

Nik Philpot, Eckoh’s Chief Operating Officer said: “It is very gratifying to have been awarded this contract by O2 as we recognise the sensitivity of the project and the quality of performance that is required. As O2’s long term supplier we are looking forward to developing a strong relationship with them and we hope to extend the services we deliver beyond the initial offering. 2004 has been a year in which Eckoh have launched several high profile and long term contracts utilising speech recognition and we believe that the benefits of the technology are becoming self-evident to clients and users alike.”

Jonny Shipp, Head of Content Standards at O2, commented: “With the increasing capability of phones we anticipate growing demand for a wide range of commercial content. It is important for us to be able to allow our customers to make informed decisions about the legal content they access, and at the same time protect the vulnerable from inappropriate content. The introduction of the age verification service is one of the core elements of our programme to restrict children’s access to content. We need a service provider who has the necessary expertise and technical infrastructure to deliver an extremely robust solution together with experience of operating high volume speech recognition applications.”

For further enquiries, please contact:

Eckoh Technologies plc
Martin Turner, Chief Executive
Nik Philpot, Chief Operating Officer
Jim Hennigan, Managing Director, Speech Solutions
Tel: 08701 100 700

Buchanan Communications
Mark Edwards/Jeremy Garcia
Tel: 020 7466 5000
 
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