Call Centres
Call centres strive to provide an excellent customer satisfaction and experience. However with an ever tightening budget call centres are constantly finding ways to drive down costs yet keeping a good level of service. One way used by some multilingual call centres is using multilingual operators.

Multilingual operators  act as receptionists and on greeting the callers with a standard greeting message prompt them to state the nature of their problem. Judging from the language of the speaker the operator routes the call to the appropriate agent who will serve the call in the caller’s language.

Multilingual Call centres handling calls in this manner help provide callers with excellent customer experience because of the personal touch involved. However keeping and maintaining multilingual operators is expensive due to their expertise and being a scarce resource. Moreover the volume and timings of calls that can be handled by a human operator becomes limited compared to an automated IVR system.

Alivox provides the best of both worlds. Through ALiS it provides a solution that will be cost effective yet give great customer experience. ALiS does this by accepting the first few words uttered by the caller and determining their language, allowing the call to be routed to an agent who can speak that language. This allows it to mimic a human operator’s role of greeting the callers and prompting them to speak and consequently route the calls to the right agent.

As can be seen, ALiS will be able to handle a larger volume of calls 24 hours a day as compared to a human operator yet keeping the customer experience same. Moreover, it will allow the call centre to hire monolingual resources (as agents) only, which are cheaper and easier to find hence driving down the costs of the call centres.

How it works
Click here to see how ALiS can help multilingual call centres to improve customer experience.

IVR
Many modern call centres of today are going towards the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) route. The main reason for this is that these systems help minimise human interaction in handling the calls thus help drive down costs. However, this hurts caller experience as well.

There are many types of IVR systems. The most common ones are the touch-based systems that require the caller to use the telephone keypads for interacting. Other systems include voice-activated systems that make use of speech recognition to know that the speaker is saying.

The voice-activated IVRs tend to be better than touch based systems in terms of caller experience as they allow a more natural way of interaction with the system. However they are largely monolingual. This is mainly because current speech recognition technology works very well on a single language while falls apart on multiple languages due to the complexity involved.

Alivox provides a solution to this problem through its product ALiS as an enabler of multilingualism in speech software. ALiS will do this by accepting the first few words uttered by the caller and determining their language. Once the language is determined it will route the call to the appropriate speech recognition system that recognises in that language. Thus acting as a switch ALiS will play a pivotal role in turning the system multilingual.

Security Services
In an uncertain world, telephone lines are routinely monitored. Many security agencies monitor every incoming and outgoing telephone call. In order to monitor calls, teams of multilingual operators are employed to distinguish between languages. This can be both cumbersome and expensive to do as it is difficult to find resources that are multilingual.

Alivox provides the solution that will be accurate and yet cost effective through its product – ALiS. ALiS will process the incoming speech and be able to recognise the language. If the language is of interest it will be passed to resource that knows that language and thus handle it effectively. Hence this will allow the security services to not only know the ethnic and language background of the speakers involved but also drive down costs and free up resources to do other useful tasks.

In addition to languages ALIS can also distinguish between accents. This is of importance where the automatic surveillance system records conversations in a particular language and there is a need to know the ethnical background of the speakers.

Multilingual Speech Recognisers
Speech recognition technology has matured over the past few years and is making its way in to many applications. Applications like speech activated IVRs like airline reservation systems have become quite common place these days. Currently there are no multilingual speech recognisers available in the market. The reason for this is that adding the cues and characteristics for recognition of speech of multiple languages in the same database make it very confusing for the recognisers. The recognisers for individual languages e.g. English are very accurate and efficient but put together the systems fall apart.

Alivox provides a solution for this through its product – ALiS. ALiS can act as a switching front-end to a battery of monolingual speech recognisers. As the speaker will speak, the speech will first pass through ALiS. ALiS will process this speech and identify the language of the speech. Once identified, it will route the rest of the speech from the speaker, to the speech recogniser that recognises in that language. Hence the overall system will become multilingual.

Multilingual speech recognisers will open way to a whole set of new applications that will cater for a much wider customer base.

Mobile Phones Market
Mobile phone market is rapidly growing. State of the art technology not only in telecommunications but also in digital photography and PDA, is being used in mobiles.

In some countries voice mail messages are being converted into text using speech recognition technology and sent to the owner. This service will allow the customers to read messages when they can’t listen. Since current speech recognition systems are monolingual it will not be possible to give this service in multiple languages.

Alivox provides a solution for this through its product ALiS. ALiS can act as a switching front-end to a battery of monolingual speech recognisers. As the speaker will speak, the speech will first pass through ALiS. ALiS will process this speech and identify the language of the speech. Once the language is identified, the entire voice mail is routed to the appropriate speech recogniser which converts it into text and sends it to the respective recipient.

Other Markets
Opportunities exist wherever a service provider might interact in a multilingual market. In particular, ALIVOX will investigate opportunities in multilingual speech solutions, mobile devices, education delivery, event and conference management, voice commerce, international hotels and international airports. This list is far from exhaustive.