Case Studies
Case Study 
Read SMS - Text to Voice
Q3 develops a completely voice based application for BlackBerry that enables the user to create, send, and listen to SMS messages using voice commands.
Q3's global sourcing model gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations and reduced time to market.
Company Profile
The Client is based in Europe and provides software solutions for different mobile platforms including the Blackberry and iPhone.
Business Situation
The Client's main objective was to develop a native application that gets seamlessly integrated with the Blackberry email / SMS client and allows the user to create and send SMS messages using voice input. The Client also wanted the application to be able to convert incoming text messages to voice to be heard by the user.
Challenges
The challenges were to:
- Come up with a voice recognition solution that could be used to take voice input for commands as well as SMS message text. Typically, mobile devices have limited resources such as RAM and processing power due to which running complex voice recognition algorithms is not feasible.
- Come up with a text to voice conversion solution to be used by the mobile application.
- Seamless integration with the BlackBerry native email / SMS client.
Technical Solution
Q3 setup a dedicated team of architects, developers and QA resources to analyze the Clients' requirements, design the solution based on these requirements, and finally develop, test, and deliver the application.
For conversion of voice to text as well as text to voice, a backend solution was implemented which exposed Web Services that could be invoked by the BlackBerry client as needed for conversion. Sphinx, the leading opensource voice recognition engine, was used to implement the backend Web Services for conversion of voice to text. Free TTS, an opensource Java based speech synthesis system from SourceForge, was used for implementation of the text to speech conversion Web Service.
The benefit of this solution was that it required minimal processing on the BlackBerry device with the bulk of the CPU and memory intensive algorithms running on the backend. The Web Services methods were designed such that only the minimal required data was transferred from the server to the Client, which ensured that the network was not a bottleneck for the performance of the application. This solution provided the Client with an application that met all the functional as well as the non-functional requirements that were outlined at the beginning of the project.
- Java/J2ME
- BlackBerry API 4.7
- SOAP Web Services
- Sphinx
- Free TTS
- Eclipse IDE
Customer Speaks
In this difficult economic environment, Symfo decided to outsource one of its most critical developments to Q3 Tech. We were definitely reluctant doing so at the beginning of the project. But rapidly we understood that Q3 had the necessary skills and professionalism to bring the project to a successful realization. It was not always easy primarily because of the differences of culture. However once we understood each other, things went much better. We also understood that such a difficult project needed intense communications between Q3 and our company. Our company works on two time zones (Europe and East Coast North America) and we were amazed by the availability of the Project Manager and his team. It really contributed improving communications between us.
Phase I of our product is now ready and we are quite happy with it. We are definitely ready to start Phase II with Q3 and we highly recommend them.
CEO, Symfo SA, Belgium.