Speech Applications

Get More Out of Speech
Few technologies have transformed contact centers and traditional IVR as much as speech. Speech-enabled applications simplify user choices, improve customer interaction, enable a wider range of automation options, speed up service, and increase return on investment.

Intervoice design teams and professional services group can help you incorporate speech into your long-range business strategy in order to increase the effectiveness of your customer contact applications, build brand awareness, and reduce costs.

Technologies
Intervoice incorporates a wide range of speech technologies throughout customer applications, including:

  • Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
  • Text-to-Speech (TTS)
  • Voice Verification/Authentication
  • Natural Language
  • Adaptive Interaction

Smart VUI Design
Empowering the user, reinforcing your brand image, reducing call time, alleviating caller frustration, and eliminating errors—just a few objectives of good application design. Good VUI design accomplishes all of these objectives and takes traditional call flow design one step further by allowing you to personalize the interaction with the caller and get the right response.

At Intervoice, our VUI design team has extensive experience in speech research, dialog design, voice casting and coaching, usability testing, and pilot user-interface tuning for speech applications. We have deployed hundreds of speech applications ranging from simple interactions to complex natural language solutions, supporting thousands of mission-critical calls a day.

Voice Branding
Companies allocate significant budget every year to reinforcing their brand in print and media, yet they often fail to extend the branding to other customer contact channels. Intervoice helps enterprises extend brand awareness to the most commonly used and interactive customer portal: the telephone.

Voice branding is as individual as the corporate brands themselves, as virtual voice agents emulate the agents they replace. Whether the voice persona is upbeat and excited, or professional and reserved, it can be as helpful and informative as a customer service representative, efficiently interacting with your customers to strengthen your service reputation in the marketplace.

Building Blocks

  • VUI Design. Intervoice has employed varying methodologies to speed application creation and utilize the best practices in application design. Through hundreds of deployments, we have developed building blocks to aid in application development, such as pre-built minor application components, vertically oriented and custom grammars, and modularized horizontal and vertical applications.
  • Components. Components are the smallest building blocks of speech. They consist of a set of prompts to accomplish a function. For example, “greet caller” or “request checking account balance” have well-defined steps that have been designed and encapsulated in a reusable, modular component building block to speed the development of a speech application.
  • Grammars. A grammar is the set of words and phrases that covers the expected range of input and output for the application. A grammar defines what the application is listening for when interacting with the caller, and uses different linguistic and statistical models to put boundaries around the application. It might be a simple, small grammar of 50 words or less, or one that contains thousands of words, such as names or addresses, for example. A grammar takes into account all specialized abbreviations and acronyms that are specific to the industry or function that the application is designed for.
  • Vocabularies. A vocabulary is the list of words that is used in the application. It is often a reusable component that can be modified to fit a number of customer applications. Intervoice has defined, built, and tested specialized vocabularies for numerous vertical markets, such as health care, brokerage and finance, entertainment, and travel.
  • Modules. Modules are applications within applications, and, like components, are developed, tested, and encapsulated for reuse in applications. For example, name and address capture is a function that can be used in numerous applications, such as subscription renewal, retail, and change of address applications.