Microsoft, Tellme Deliver Benefits Of Voice In The Cloud

Tellme, a subsidiary of Microsoft, has announced three core speech and network innovations that advance its platform for cloud-based voice services. The new technologies significantly reduce costs for enterprise customer service while enabling a smarter caller experience. These advancements include the rollout of a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) carrier service that reduces customer transport costs, advanced speech services that improve automation of customer service calls, and a new ‘voice font’ technology that delivers a more natural text-to-speech experience.

The new speech services are a result of collaboration between Tellme and Microsoft’s Speech Components Group. These jointly designed technologies will be leveraged to advance natural user interfaces across Microsoft products to benefit customers worldwide. Because Tellme operates as an on-demand service, the new capabilities are immediately available to enterprises across Tellme’s platform. In addition, Tellme is now using these technologies to power its mobile services, including the Windows Mobile 6.5 application announced today.

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“Our goal is to give enterprises technology that improves the customer experience but also affords them the ultimate financial flexibility when deploying voice services,” said Jamie Bertasi, senior director of Business Solutions at Tellme. “From initial deployments we’re seeing impressive cost savings and results that we’re sure our customers will be excited about.”

Getting the right answer more often, increasing automation

One of the biggest frustrations of speech services is that they do not always understand the caller. Increasing the odds of getting it right makes the overall customer experience better, improving customers’ confidence in using the system, and lowering the total cost per call to the enterprise.

Partnering with Microsoft’s speech team, Tellme provided tuning data from its billions and billions of calls and design expertise to develop new acoustic models, phonetic dictionaries and grammar products that increase the accuracy of every response. The teams built an ‘online adaptation’ capability in which the system can adapt to a caller’s acoustic patterns within the first three seconds of speaking. These new platform features make it possible to get the right answer to the caller more often.

Creating a natural experience

Both the way customers request information and the way they hear the answer have been improved with two new technologies: expanded multislot recognition and a new voice font called Zira.

Multislot technology makes it possible for callers to ask for information in a full sentence or phrase, such as “I wanna buy 5,000 shares of Coca-Cola,” and the system listens for the relevant words, in this case ‘buy’, ‘5,000 shares’ and ‘Coca-Cola’. Then, if any information is missing or not understood, the system can ask just for the specific word clarification without re-prompting for the entire answer, making the call faster and increasing the customer’s satisfaction.

In addition, Tellme, leveraging the Microsoft Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine, has developed a new custom TTS service with its voice font called Zira. Zira has been created with a technique designed for consistency in voice quality and delivery that provides a more conversational experience. The voice talent for Zira was coached by audio engineers to record popular phrases and words used in customer service requests.