News

Wait for the "listening phone" from Windows, by Xmas?

Don't look at the screen: just ask. Tellme and Microsoft are working to get a new voice service "to be an out-of-the-box experience on Windows Mobile 6.5 phones when they come to market this Fall," Microsoft announced this week - after acquiring Tellme.

The service will help people use their phone without  having to look down at the screen, revealed a source inside Microsoft. "If you want to ask for movie information, the weather, traffic, or find a restaurant through Microsoft Live Search, the results will be delivered right to the screen. Saying commands like, "Call home" or "Text Joe" will make getting stuff done much faster," said the executive, and then added: " - and easier to do with one hand."

No, sadly, you can't download it and run it. This is a service provided to operators, or to handset makers.

Tellme, a subsidiary of Microsoft, described this as including 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 faster, smarter caller experience," is the way the official line went.

Innovation appears to be available in vocabulary, too: "These advancements," said the innovative announcement, "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."

Whether the service will recognise neologisms like "advancements" remains to be seen, but Microsoft is hinting that languages other than English will be catered for. Recite, previewed at Mobile World Congress, apparently copes with other European languages, so the tech is available.

But there's a lot more to Tellme than voice recognition over the air. The full MS press release points to a big corporate-focus in marketing. Sample:

Saving Money on Operating Costs

Handling customer phone inquiries represents a multimillion-dollar expense for many Fortune 1000 companies, with telecom being one of the largest technology costs. Now with Global Crossing VoIP service, enterprises can extend their VoIP strategy to customer service calls and eliminate transfer fees, lowering the average per-minute cost 60 percent per call and reducing transfer fees by 100 percent.

In addition, Tellme enterprise customers have another option to save significant money on telecom beyond the expensive maintenance of toll-free numbers: local number service. With the rising, widespread use of mobile phones, nationwide caller plans lessen the need for consumers to use toll-free numbers. With the benefit of toll-free numbers diminishing, having an alternative local number can save costs without affecting the consumer experience. Now, working with Global Crossing, Tellme makes it possible for enterprises to use less expensive local numbers for their customer service.

And there's more: call centre customers appear to have generated much of this technology:

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.

Results in early deployments are impressive. With an average of $3 per customer service call handled by a live agent, a phone service handling 200,000 calls per day would save just over $2 million per year for every 1 percent improvement in call automation. Trials of the new services with customer applications that handle millions of calls every week indicate an up to 2 percent increase in automated task completion, which translates to millions of dollars in savings every year.

The full PR blurb is available online. Website: http://www.tellme.com/