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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?"
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
...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.