Recent Posts - page 153
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Developer Uses Tropo to Make “Twitter Phone” a Reality
Dan York, chief conversationalist at Voxeo, reports that a developer with the pseudonym “Devoh” used Voxeo’s Tropo API-based development platform as part of a hack to let people phone into Twitter. The new service, called Tweeter Phone, enables registered callers to hear recent tweets from their selected friends. Devoh reportedly attended a single Tropo introductory session, then went home and spent five hours to bring up the new service. This is the sort of rapid application development and API-based phone mashup that is destined to keep the telephone (most likely mobile ) an integral part of everyday communication, community-building and commerce.
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Nuance Takes AirFrance’s Customer Care Line into More Countries
Based on very favorable acceptance of a single-number service that started in October 2006, AirFrance entered the second phase of its speech enabled customer care portal “powered by Nuance”. The initial set of services offered flight schedules, bookings (with intelligent transfer to agents) and real time flight information in French and UK English. In the second phase new contact centers have been set up in Europe, Asia, North and South America supporting calls from over 20 countries. -
SVOX Opens Office in Auto Makers’ Backyard
Embedded speech processing specialist SVOX clearly believes that speech recognition may be a big part of any turnaround that could occur in the automotive industry. Stating that it shows commitment to growth, the company has established a new 30-person office in Ulm, Germany. CEO Martin Reber says that the staff will focus on development of embedded speech recognition and “speech dialog” systems. He expects the size of the Ulm-based team to double in the coming years as it takes advantage of opportunities to collaborate with firms like Audi, Daimler and Porsche on R&D efforts for speech processing in future models. -
Google Voice: Assessing GrandCentral’s Relaunch
Featured Research
GrandCentral’s developers have had close to two years to define and implement the enhancements that best leverage the assets of its owner, Google. The result, Google Voice, is a high profile showcase which is mostly for “insiders” who are already initiated to GrandCentral. In the longer run, the ability to search and manage the artifacts of asynchronous interactions will be a boon to phone-based commerce.Advisories are available to registered users only.
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Tuvox’s “New Deal”: An Offer That’s Harder to Refuse
The chilly global financial climate has caused corporate spending to come to a stop, especially when it comes to capital spending. While many executives pay lip service to the importance of optimizing customer care experieince, investment in contact center, speech processing and IVR infrastructure has suffered along with all the other candidates for IT and Telecom investment. Tuvox has designed a new program that lowers the barriers for companies to adopt speech technologies and reduces the cost of continuous enhancement by shortening development cycles. -
New Manifestation of Google Voice Adds Voicemail Transcription
For this analyst, the roll-out of Google Voice has been agonizingly slow. Four days after the launch, our inbox still bears the message “Your account is not yet ready to be upgraded. Please check back shortly.” Still, after nearly two years under Google’s tutelage, we must report that, in addition to international calling (at a small fee) the transcription of voicemail is the most notable enhancement to the original GrandCentral service.
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Four Steps Leading to the intelligent Customer Front Door™
In this report, commissioned by Genesys Labs, Opus Research enumerates the steps it takes to install and maintain an intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD). A key finding is that virtually every firm that has invested in resources to improve their customers’ self-service and agent-assisted experiences has already started along a well-blazed and relatively short path to measurable improvements in the quality of customer care and, ultimately, profitability.
Featured Research
Customer loyalty is a two-way street. Businesses around the world are finding greater success at winning, serving and retaining customers when they are able to respond quickly and effectively whenever they call. intelligent Customer Front Door™ (iCFD) is a metaphor that describes a set of applications and technological resources that enable businesses to identify callers and quickly aggregate information about them to assist in successfully resolving their needs. Implementing the iCFD is an incremental process that involves integrating self-service and intelligent routing with contact center applications. Many firms are farther along than their managers might think in terms of implementing iCFD. This document illustrates a simple set of “steps toward iCFD” to help you locate your progress and readiness for full-blown implementation.Reports are available to registered users only.
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VC’s Invest $17 Million More in Transera
Congratulations to Transera. The virtual contact center routing specialist just raised another $17 million from Funders included Accel Partners, which has an office in Palo Alto; Apax Partners, which has a U.S. office in New York; and Lighthouse Capital Partners and Storm Ventures. The proceeds are earmarked (if we can use that term) to step up go-to-market partnerships as well as product development.
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Apple Releases New iPod Shuffle With VoiceOver
Apple has released a third-generation iPod Shuffle, the smallest of its portable music devices. Among the new features is VoiceOver, a text-to-speech capability that can tell the listener the name of the song or artist, ability to navigate playlists, or hear status information such as battery life. According to Apple, the new iPod Shuffle is multi-lingual and can speak up to 14 languages.
VoiceOver is already found on the Mac OS X operating system as a built-in accessibility feature for the visually impaired. And in November 2008, VoiceOver was included in an update for iTunes. Because it doesn’t include a visual screen or multi-touch technology, the Shuffle is a perfect candidate for speech services. But the fact that Apple is taking strides to highlight the speech capability for the iPod Shuffle underscores the value and form function for voice navigation on mobile devices.
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Voxeo’s Tropo: ‘Telco in LegoLand’
Featured Research
Voxeo’s introduction of Tropo will accelerate the organic growth in the community voice and telephony application developers by reinforcing links with API-oriented programmers. Innovation reins in spite of (or because of) challenging economic times.Advisories are available to registered users only.
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