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Enterprise Voice Applications - Voice Activated Self-Service Applications
Summary
Calsoft is actively involved in developing automated applications, which help enterprises in cutting transaction costs by reducing the need for live operators in Call Centers. Traditionally, only the most rudimentary applications were possible - checking account balances, or order status enquiry - but now, Calsoft has created very sophisticated transactions such as placing a secure order (through speaker-verification technology), making bill payments or booking appointments, thus reducing the load on Call Centers.
Challenge
The biggest problem when building an automated self-service application over the telephone has always been the user interface. The limited options available through a 12-button telephone keypad simply do not allow for the development of a sophisticated, intuitive application: instead, for over a decade, Calsoft has been forced to listen to long messages often beginning with, "Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed …". These IVR systems are prohibitively expensive and difficult to maintain. Also providing web applications for self-service is limited to the computer savvy users alone.
Solution
The advent of accurate, reliable, speaker-independent speech recognition technology for telephone-based applications changes all this. Current state-of-the-art systems can recognize approximately 10,000 words with a very high degree of accuracy in a poor-quality environment (for example, a digital cell phone with a lot of background noise) without being trained to a particular speaker's voice. Calsoft has leveraged this technology to provide very sophisticated applications based on the most intuitive user interface of all: the spoken command. Simply giving the caller the option of using either tones or speech-recognition significantly reduces the number of callers who escape to a live operator, thus saving money for the enterprise and increasing the customer's perceived service level. Ubiquity of phone devices, maturity of the speech recognition technology makes the solutions from Calsoft, a logical extension to web based transaction systems.
Calsoft has successfully used the technology to provide robust and cost effective business solutions to banks, credit unions, corporate, online ordering systems and appointment booking applications. These solutions can help to reduce transaction costs upto 80%, and are easily scalable to meet enterprise requirements.
Technology
The voice recognition and translation engine is built on Java components leveraging the J2EE framework. The applications are built around the latest Voice Recognition, Call handling and Text-to-Speech conversion engines from SpeechWorks, IBM and L&H. Standard Voice XML (VXML) over HTTP is used to ensure portability and use of existing web based architectures. The solution is platform independent and can be integrated with any database or proprietary backend systems.