Tellme since it was acquired by Microsoft for a reported $800 million two years ago. Jamie Bertasi, director of Tellme Business Solutions, says the group has rolled out some new features since then, but it spent much of the past two years developing improved features aimed at automating customer service call centers for large companies, features that it's announcing tonight.
Those features include better speech processing, a new "voice font" called Zira, and support for voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) calls. Collectively, Tellme says these features should make the experience of automated customer service less annoying for customers and cheaper for businesses.
The speech processing upgrade consists of a number of improvements. For one thing, with each call Tellme processes the sound in the first three seconds and assigns the call a specific "acoustic model" to use when changing the voice into text, which should improve accuracy. The service also does a better job now of saving different kinds of data, to avoid situations where a customer constantly has to repeat long statements. For example, if someone calls to ask about a flight from Boston to San Francisco on Tuesday, and Tellme didn't understand the second part of the sentence, it would previously have asked them to repeat everything. Now, the service can save the fact that the caller is flying from Boston on Tuesday, repeat the information to them, then ask where they're flying to. Tellme also says it's improving its support for natural language applications, so that the service understands what you're saying, rather than forcing customers to think of the exact combination of keywords.
Tellme, whose offices are in Mountain View, Calif., says it's been testing these services with E*Trade and seen a 91 percent recognition rate, with a 2 percent improvement of task completion. That's more significant that it sounds, because "automation is nothing if not a gain of inches," says Director of Marketing Brooks Crichlow.
As for the the new "voice font," it's basically the voice that Tellme uses when it has to automatically read information when a prerecorded word or phrase is not available. Zira is supposed to be optimized for making street names, cities, states, business listings, and proper names easy to hear. The company sent me a few samples, and while I couldn't really see what the big deal was, it certainly doesn't sound like the flat, mechanical voice I find on many automated services.
Lastly, Tellme now allows companies to route calls through Global Crossing's VoIP service, rather than standard phone lines. Not only does that have the inherent cost-savings of VoIP, but it also means Tellme businesses can direct their customers to local phone numbers rather than national toll-free lines that it has to pay for.
Bertasi says that all together, these new features "kind of get us the tipping points" to make automated call centers an irresistible option for big enterprises. Not having used the service myself, I can't say if that's true, but I'm certainly in favor of anything that makes those automated customer service calls better.