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TuVox Voice Interface
pablos writes: "NYTimes has an article about Tuvox who set up Handspring and Activision with voice interfaces for tech support. Apparently they can do away with the annoying 'press # now' menus. I've used things like TellMe, which played an ad everytime it didn't understand you, but I'm wondering if this sort of thing is starting to work anywhere. Anybody called Handspring for tech support lately?"
AT&T has a similar service for their "easy reach 800" customers, you can speak your 5 digit combination, or opt to speak to a representative, all without the keypad. Pretty basic, but it's been around for at least 4 or 5 years.
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Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
I noticed starting about two months ago that whenever I called the main number for AT&T Broadband, I would get the message:
"For digital cable, press or say 1" etc.
A lot of times to avoid complicated and looping voicemail, I just don't press anything to fake like I have a rotary phone and get transferred to the first available agent.
Well, that trick is no more! Since even rotary phone users can say their choices, not doing or saying anything disconnects you. Pretty crafty.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
http://archives.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http:// www.nytimes.com/2002/02/11/technology/ebusiness/11 VOX.html
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Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
I have been looking at a product called InterVoice Brite that appears to have a similar function. Not only do they have the software available for use inhouse, but also an ASP offering. From listening to their sample sound files, they are way ahead of a lot of the basic "say or press one" implementations I have seen.
For people interested in seeing how far NLSR (Natural Language Speech Recoginition) can be pushed for specific applications go and look at VeCommerce and their demo clips. The betting system I helped build can take betting sentences of over 100 words with 96% accuracy. (Data from a live system with 1200 lines)
Customers HATE DTMF based systems, this sort of thing is the way of the future.
...keeping the customer from costing you any money.
CRM is *expensive*. Forrester Research did a study a while back on the average cost of handling customer calls by various means:
Telephone: $33.00/incident
Email: $9.99/incident
Chat: $7.80/incident
Message Boards: $4.57/incident
Knowledge Base: $1.17/incident
The technology of this article shifts a call from the top to the bottom of this list. They admit that the advance is not in AI or voice tech, but in making the experience "resemble a conversation". So at its best, this will still let grandma have *some* access to the information she could have had before from a live human. At its worst, it's a puppet show to distract us from the fact that we're not getting very good service.
I went to Seattle a few years ago, but my bags didnt. Outside of the Beast being based next door to Seattle, it is a wonderful city. I called the airline (United) and was asked to 'press or say' whichever number was to get an update for lost luggage.
It then asked me to speak the destination city and the departure city, then asked for the claim number I got when I reported the bags and it would let me know that theyd still not found my luggage.
This was 2 or 3 years ago and it worked pretty flawlessly, and I'm pretty sure the technology has come along since then too. There were times I had to repeat myself, but that's better than sitting on hold forever just to be told by the person on the other end who's day, in their minds, is worse than yours that you should stop worrying about it and get on with your life.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.-Franklin
I got one of those e-mails a year ago that offered free magazines and decided what the hell! 2 free magazines for a whole year, not bad, just need to call a certain 800 # to cancel them or they'll bill your credit card. So I called a few weeks ago. Lo and behold it was totally voice automated! Took my 12+ digit ID with no errors. Recognized my saying the full name of a magazine for the correct abbreviation on their list of publications. Would repeat anything it just said by simply saying "repeat". Understood "yes", "no", and "correct". Actually sounded decent, not at all like those services that have pre-recorded phrases and it has to fill in certain blanks. This sounded natural! And it all worked on the first try. Two magazines canceled and the only buttons to push were the 800#. I was impressed. Werelock
just for those of us who dont like to give out or info to read an article
the article without registration
Hello everyone. I'm Ashok, the CTO and cofounder of TuVox - the one with the Frankenstein green skin in the New York times article ;-)
It's really great to see fellow slashdotters interested in our technology.
Some comments/thoughts/observations to offer. I'll try and add notes over the course of today.
We provide automated technical support using speech recognition as an underlying modality. Speech-based technical support is a very different kind of problem than a more conventional speech application.
Most speech applications are "few turns" and low ambiguity. It only takes a few interactions with the system to get a train schedule, or a stock quote and there is little ambiguity - you either want to go to City A, or City B. Companies that provide few-turn, low-ambiguity applications spend literally tens of thousands of dollars (or even hundreds of thousands of dollars), getting each turn to be as accurate as possible. The content of such an application rarely changes, and if it does, the rollout/testing period can be very long. A final note - these callers generally use the system frequently (ie. calling for a stock quote). Because of this, callers are willing to be educated on the commands/VUI to drive the system.
We, on the other hand, have to deal with long conversations (10 minutes), with users fumbling with their equipment, confused and angry, etc. You can imagine a call System: "How can we help" - Caller - "My $#@% machine doesnt work".... We have to get the caller to their answer, in spite of the fact that they don't know what the answer is. Additionally this is probably the first time the user has ever used the system. Finally, we have to make literally thousands of answers available in a conversational style, the day the product ships. That's when the highest call volume occurs (in the few weeks after the product ships). Oh...by the way - we use real humans for the voices, not text-to-speech. That makes the production schedule even more interesting!
Callers can leave us messages about their experience. It's really heartwarming (in the words of one of our customers) to hear what callers say - we got a call a few nights ago (at 1 in the morning) where a caller said he was glad that he was able to solve his battery recharging problem, because he thought he was going to lose all his data. The part of the New York Times article talking about people saying thank you occurs very frequently. They say thank you in so many places we have started to put thank you responses into the system.
Callers dont' have to wait. Callers get answers at any time. Callers dont get rude, untrained, agents abusing them (everyone at TuVox has had a horrible experience with an ISP tech support agent)! Our customers like that proposition!
Last point - It's not a choice between a live agent and automated support. We're offering the alternative to no agent at all. People think we're replacing agents. We're not. Our technology is designed to work with and support a tech support agent. Right now, our initial rollouts with customers are after hours because that's where the call volume is lowest and where we can fix any unforeseen problems. But there's even more interesting technologies in our pipeline.
Kindest Regards,
Ashok