Datria looks to marry mobile phones, databases

TeleForms product speech-enables applications.

By John Fontana
Network World, 09/04/00

DENVER - Datria Systems hopes to become the voice of mobile phone and database integration with its newest speech-recognition software.

The company has begun shipping its VoCarta TeleForms, a voice-enabled system that allows mobile phone users to enter information to and retrieve it from corporate databases using speech.

Datria believes mobile phones can supplant rugged laptops that companies use for collecting data in the field. Observers and end users say Datria software provides dramatic improvements in data-collection accuracy as well as reduced hardware costs and software maintenance.

"Datria has the potential to radically drop the cost per user of these data-collection systems," says J.D. Wilson, an industry analyst for Englewood, Colo., consulting firm SharperInsight. A rugged laptop used in the field can cost $10,000, while a typical mobile phone is $200. Besides hardware costs, Wilson says VoCarta makes it cheaper to maintain applications because they are run from a server and not on individual laptops.

Datria is hoping to voice-enable applications used in the field by mobile workers, such as work order updates, dispatch and crew scheduling, field inventory and asset maintenance. The goal is to replace pen and paper with a much faster and accurate system.

"Instead of sending out two people to collect data by hand, we have a golf cart that is driven down the road by one guy talking into a microphone," says Lynne Center, project engineer for the City of Aurora, Colo. The city, which uses the software as part of street maintenance and tree trimming projects, is able to compress what had been a month's worth of data collection into a week.

Center has yet to explore the real-time connectivity of TeleForms, but is using VoCarta Field, a voice-enabled system to collect data before uploading it into a database.

Now that the city can quickly collect data, it also can do more planning. "We get a pool of money for repair projects from the city. Before VoCarta, we would start at one end of the city and work toward the other end until the money ran out," Center says. "Now, we can analyze the data we collect and hit our high-priority projects first."

Datria acquired the VoCarta speech recognition technology three years ago from Lockheed Martin. VoCarta is a set of tools for building server-based applications that map text into forms. It requires a separate speech engine to convert speech to text.

The tools also can be used to retrofit existing applications and to build in support for global positioning systems that provide location information. TeleForms also generates the vocabulary that is used with an application.

VoCarta runs on Windows NT and supports connections to relational databases or a spatial database, which can print out a map pinpointing where data was collected.

VoCarta TeleForms, which is available now, supports speech engines from Lernout & Hauspie, Microsoft, Nuance and Speechworks. The software is priced from $1,000 to $4,000 per user.