Business communications specialist Damovo has generated €500,000 in revenues from the sale of speech-recognition software to Irish firms in the last 12 months and expects this to triple to €1.5 million over the next year.

Damovo has partnered with Nuance, a US company which specialises in speech recognition, to deliver phone-based systems which enable customers to get information or have their calls routed simply by talking to an automated attendant.

The two firms are currently working on a multilingual system for car hire group Hertz which will be deployed at its European reservation centre in Swords, Co Dublin.

In the past, Damovo has supplied Europe's largest speech-recognition call-answering solution to University College Dublin and provided Irish Rail with the speech technology for its talking timetable.

John McCabe, managing director of Damovo in Ireland, said speech-recognition software was now accurate enough for increasingly sophisticated users.

In Australia, the tax authorities were using it to allow citizens to make basic tax returns over the phone, he said.

"A lot of these projects are really about business processes - how they want to handle their customers," says Mr McCabe. "The technology is just the enabler."

The Damovo group, based in the UK, was formed in 2001 after Apax Partners' acquisition of Ericsson's enterprise business.