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?"

Comments

AT&T has been doing this for a while

[JoeShmoe]

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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Link for No Registration

[NewbieSpaz]

http://archives.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http:// www.nytimes.com/2002/02/11/technology/ebusiness/11 VOX.html

Leading Edge NLSR

[kelv]

(Warning I have worked for the following company during my undergraduate EE degree)

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.

Customer Relations Management is all about...

[TekkonKinkreet]

...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.

some airlines use this type of sytem

[nsanit]

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.