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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?"
I wonder....
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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.
"Thank you for calling 999, which service do you require?"
FIRE!!
"[pause]Your request has been passed on. In order to optimise future use of this service, please repeat the following list of words in a steady voice: cat, dog, bar, sky, foo..."
The train company in Sweden has one of these systems. It's always amusing listening to my other half battle with it when she wants to buy a ticket:
:-)
OtherHalf (in very clear voice): Stockholm
Computer : click, click,... Kiruna!
OtherHalf : Stockholm!
Computer : click, click,... Moscow!
OtherHalf : Stockholm!
Computer : click, click,... Alpha Centauri!
etc...
To be fair, it does eventually work, it just takes a while. It probably also takes less total time than the alternative (short conversation with a human, but a long wait to get to talk to them).
The best thing about them was a recent radio program. They had done some reseach to find out what words sound (to the system) like destinations. During the show they'd phone SJ up and say things like "I want to go to FsckingBastardVille", to which the computer would reply "Northern or central Stockholm?" and other such amusements.
Hours of fun
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
..exactly new, is it?
:)
It's been a while since there was really much media hype about voice recognition technologies. Sure, the whole voice activated menu's "1, 2 etc." has been around for quite a few years, but I suppose there is a huge difference between repeating a few numbers than describing technical problems. I mean, is this literally a flowchart menu with various diagnostic paths or does it actually try and understand a sentance? If it's the former, then that is nothing more advanced than what is currently available and probably in use elsewhere.
I wonder what would be more frustrating, repeating yourself twenty times to a computer to battle through a menu, or sitting for twenty minutes trying to explain your problem to a ex k-mart 1st line support engineer. The choice is yours
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
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
A friend of mine (from Australia) went to the US a year or two ago, and found himself needing to call a service which used such a system. When he did, he found that it could not understand his accent; after three unsuccessful attempts at doing an "American" accent, he gave up.
The moral of this story: make sure that there's a touch-tone menu to fall back on.
Well, the other day when I accidently baked my Visor, I had to call their support line....
~.Evanrude
SpeechWorks' OpenVXI, originally promoted as an open source VXML interpreter, has turned out not to be a good one. Speechworks developers maintain the code, and refuse to incorporate the patches and requests of the open source community, in favor of keeping OpenVXI tied to Speechworks products. The codebase could be forked, but it's really not worth investing the effort in such a brittle product tied to proprietary solutions.
Bayonne, the GNU telephony server, is great and getting better all the time. It currently supports a strong scripting language for DTMF applications, and Bayonne's XML plugin structure and built-in support for multiple telephony cards makes it the logical choice for open source VXML.
All that's needed at this point is to finish integrating Bayonne with an open source Text-To-Speech engine (most-likely candidates are Flite or Festival), Automatic Speech Recognition engine (in this case, Sphinx) and write the XML plugin. But there is a shortage of coders with the skill and time to do this.
I really think small business and the average Slashdotter could benefit from an open source VXML solution. Small businesses could create professional telephony apps that could make them much more competitive (from accepting credit cards securely over the phone to providing dedicated 24-hr support numbers for their products), while creative coders could use it for everything from Eliza-style chatbot answering machines to having your boxen call you up and describe a hack attempt as it's being made.
I'd love to see a VXML enabled Bayonne blow TellMe and others out of the water. If you're intrigued and you'd like to get involved, check out Bayonne's Sourceforge site and sign up for the mailing list.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.