MeritTrac Services & Carnegie Speech in strategic partnership

(I-Newswire) June 7, 2007 - Bangalore, June 7, 2007: MeritTrac Services, India's Largest skills assessment company, today announced a strategic partnership with Carnegie Speech, US to bring the world-renowned Carnegie Speech AssessmentTM automated voice evaluation technology to India. On the occasion, MeritTrac also formally unveiled a thought paper on voice evaluation which throws new light on benefits that can accrue to the voice-based BPO players by adopting a different philosophy on assessments. To familiarize the Indian businesses on the new tools and technology, there will be a series of workshops starting with Delhi and moving to Bangalore & Pune.
The new automated speech testing technology/tool is superior to existing tools, which usually grade users against a general benchmark of English fluency and goes onto classify the quality of individual's speech providing a cost-effective, objective assessment capability to BPO companies and educational institutions that need to assess large number of applicants.
Commenting on the partnership, Angela Kennedy, CEO, Carnegie Speech, said,"We are extremely pleased to partner with MeritTrac in bringing this tool to India. India has been a hub for the voice- based BPO industry with an acute need to recruit the best talent and provide world-class services. Voice evaluations have been the key for BPO's in identifying quality talent, and Carnegie Speech AssessmentTM will prove of immense benefit to recruiters. The Carnegie tool is a product of painstaking research on spoken and linguistic patterns from across the world and provides assessment of spoken English with remarkable accuracy. Carnegie Speech AssessmentTM provides micro feedback on parameters such as vowel sounds which would help companies make their training programs more effective." She also added that Carnegie Speech would also venture into resource training for the voice based BPO industry on its own.
Commenting on the tie up, Mohan Kannegal, Co-founder and Director, MeritTrac Services said, "The partnership marks the shift of voice assessments from being a rejection tool to being more a selection tool. The technology also plugs another key gap in existing tools–the absence of inputs for training. The partnership is in sync with our philosophy of knowledge-led offerings that bring a significant value-addition."



Briefly sharing key highlights of the unveiled thought paper, Mohan said," Last year when we unveiled the Communication skills index here in Delhi we highlighted the challenges facing the talent pool. Post that we were keenly looking at ways to help the industry address this challenge and we figured that if accurate inputs can be generated for training in voice, it will lead to better yields - thus allowing the industry to tap into more of the existing pool. This will be of immense help to the voice-based BPO players and our thought paper has a case-study which just validates this possibility."
The Carnegie tool owing to the inbuilt flexibility is highly useful for the BPO/call centre environment. The tool uses classified customer data for customizing the assessment to categorize the prospective agents in the most useful way for each customer, which is unique to Carnegie Speech. The technology could also be customized to focus on known regional speech difficulties which is of particular relevance to India.
Carnegie Speech, US, is a speech assessment and tutoring Software Company focusing on testing and improving English pronunciation for non-native speakers. Using state-of-the-art speech recognition technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University it markets applications that solve specific problems in the BPO and education markets. Carnegie Speech uses speech recognition and pinpointing technology to listen to a user's speech and to pinpoint exactly what was correct and incorrect in the sound, rhythm and pitch of the speech. This product is also based on a targeted embodiment of the linguistics and second-language learning literature and would automatically adapt to explicit assessment classifications.

Founded in 2000, MeritTrac is India's Largest Skills Assessment Company, having assessed over 2 million candidates for over 170 customers. A neutral organization that provides quantitative inputs on the talent pool and measures competencies for specific roles, MeritTrac designs & delivers assessments for corporate/individual customers. MeritTrac currently tests around 80,000 candidates per month across IT, BPO, BFSI, Retail, Engineering and Education verticals. Its' clientele includes ABB, Accenture, Adobe, Aricent, Cognizant, Convergys, Google, HAL, HP, HSBC, IBM, ITC, Microsoft, MindTree, SAP labs, TESCO, UTI Bank, Verizon etc. Through TracSkills, its' Individual Certification program, MeritTrac partners academic institutions like Bharathiar University and Visvesvaraya Technological University for assessing students on industry-readiness. Bangalore-based MeritTrac has 450+ fulltime employees and 1000+ certified test administrators on its rolls. Its pan-Indian presence includes "MeritTrac Assessment Zones" in Bangalore, Hyderabad & New Delhi, offices in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata and Coimbatore.. Manipal Educational Group (MEG) recently came onboard as Investors with a majority stake in MeritTrac.
For further details visit www.merittrac.com

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