In any business climate, the art of discovering, selecting and applying cutting-edge technologies to make your company more efficient and easier to do business with, is an unfaltering goal. The right technology choice often separates leaders from laggards: It has the power to differentiate your company in your customers' eyes, reduce your costs without sacrificing high-quality customer relationships and produce a measurable, demonstrable return on investment (ROI). Nuance pioneered the speech application strategy process with a series of modular, free-of-charge consulting programs: Nuance's Speech Technology Evaluation Process (S.T.E.P.™).

From selecting applications that will deliver the greatest return, to determining the best integration, development and deployment options, to launching your speech services to market—S.T.E.P. is designed to help you when and where you need help most. The program includes:

• Application Discovery
  Selecting the "right" speech application for your business. We’ve put our tools in your hands: Application Discovery is now available through an online tool that incorporates best practices and benchmarks from the hundreds of companies that have deployed speech. Nuance provides real time collaboration in an online meeting tool, uniting your Speech Team across geographies and lines of business.
• Monetization
  Monetization provides organizations with industry benchmarks, simple and sophisticated ROI models, and historical results to help build and execute the optimum business case for an organization.
• Connections
  Connections joins your S.T.E.P. business and technical participants together for an interactive Speech Summit. We will collectively define your solution components, evaluate your platform options, and determine the key integration points to backend databases and CTI systems. The end result is a custom implementation plan and a short list of Nuance's technology partners that can best help you develop your unique speech service. At this time Nuance will produce custom audio clips that illustrate how your speech service will sound and function.
• Guarantee
  The garantee is a commitment to customers to deliver and guarantee results. The Guarantee ensures that our customers' speech systems are delivered on time and that your callers are successfully completing their speech transactions—or your money back. Select Nuance partners are uniquely suited to offer the Guarantee to customers based on Nuance's open, standards-based products, patented OpenSpeech™ DialogModules™, proven application development and user interface methodologies, and close partner relationships.
• Market Accelerator Program (MAP)
  The Market Accelerator Program is designed to maximize ROI of your speech application by promoting and positioning your speech services in the most effective way possible. The Program—conceived by Nuance customers and architected based on their requirements—features a process for positioning, promoting, and marketing speech services, and also features best practices and other proven methods for promoting and marketing speech.

Interested in participating in S.T.E.P. Online? Go to steponline.scansoft.com/login.asp. S.T.E.P. Demo

The S.T.E.P. Online tool incorporates best practices and benchmarks from the hundreds of companies that have participated in this process. Modular in its framework, S.T.E.P. is designed to help you when and where you need help most, whether you are identifying speech applications for your company, building the business case for speech or marketing speech to your callers. A few of the tangible benefits that S.T.E.P. Online include are:

• Industry insights and best practices relevant to your company
• Tangible experience with speech applications and Marketing materials in your industry
• Real time collaboration in an online meeting tool, uniting your Speech Team across lines of business
• A streamlined information gathering and/or sharing process

Interested in participating in S.T.E.P. Online? Go to steponline.scansoft.com/login.asp.