Voxeo Talks

An interesting blurb from this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, entitled “OMG, I’m Answering a Poll Honestly,” suggested that questions about sensitive topics – and questions with numerical answers – may be more precisely answered when the poll is conducted via text messages versus voice:

“Researchers asked questions of more than 600 iPhone users, both by voice and text… You might expect more caution in texts, which leave a trail, but texters gave less flattering (and therefore presumably more accurate) answers, confessing to higher levels of drinking and less churchgoing, for instance. And on questions demanding numerical answers, texters gave fewer round numbers, suggesting they were trying to be precise.”

The New School for Social Research and the University of Michigan conducted this study. There are a variety of reasons the text answers may have yielded increased detail – most potential explanations center around the fact that text messaging is asynchronous, eliminating the pressure to respond immediately that comes with a voice conversation, which can result in more thoughtful answers to open-ended questions and eliminate the pressure to round or guess at answers to numeric questions; privacy issues and surrounding distractions might also be in play, as both could be more likely to affect a voice conversation than a text one.

The results are intriguing for anyone who polls their customer base – if you know that most of your demographic has phones that support text messaging, the answers you get via text may be more specific and detailed. And as communication preferences evolve and texting becomes even more pervasive, this functionality will be even more valuable. This is one of the reasons the ability to build an application once and deploy it across any communication channel that Voxeo VoiceObjects offers is so valuable – it’s easy to survey your customer base using traditional outbound IVR techniques, via SMS or even to collect responses through social media (e.g., Twitter).

As part of Voxeo’s partnership with Integrated Voice Solutions (IVS), we’re announcing the ability to automate migration from existing legacy and end-of-life interactive voice response (IVR) systems to the more flexible and powerful open-standards technology of our communication platforms, Prophecy and VoiceObjects. When an end-of-life or legacy system is migrated to our more advanced Voxeo platform, businesses will be able to create just one single application and deploy it across any combination of voice, text or mobile web-based communication channels, giving their contact centers the ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences that aligns with customer communication preferences.

From the press release:

Businesses understand the importance of exceeding customer expectations, yet many contact centers have been stymied by the time and expense it takes to re-develop their existing voice applications to support the latest functionality and communication preferences. IVS uses Arca+ to facilitate these migrations quickly, easily and cost-effectively, which means businesses no longer have to maintain obsolete technology and pay high support and service fees.

Arca+ automates the migration from outdated, end-of-life Intervoice IQTalk and Edify EVIP platforms to Voxeo, so applications can easily be transported and maintained in a modern, standards-based development environment that mitigates the risk of future lock-in to any specific platform. The Voxeo platform supports multi-channel self-service interactions across mobile web, smartphone apps, live chat, text and social networks like Twitter. IVS will add migration options for other platforms as client needs demand. Voxeo also offers its own Migration Manager tool for Nortel/PeriPro users who want the flexibility of Voxeo’s powerful open standards technology.

“Enterprise contact centers no longer have to suffer with their existing, end-of-life IVR applications while the competition leaps ahead with cutting-edge customer outreach,” said John Amein, senior vice president of product management at Voxeo. “Arca+ provides a path for these companies to migrate to the number one platform in the communication application industry faster, easier and with less cost than rewriting.”

For more info on IVS’ Arca+ solution including demo videos of how an application can be imported into the Arca+ system, then exported to Voxeo VoiceObjects, check out our Voxeo Partner Spotlight on IVS. IVS also offers a free, no-obligation application audit and cost analysis, so companies can best understand their cost savings and options. More information on the free cost analysis can be found at http://www.voxeo.com/migration.

On the Speech Technology Blog yesterday, an article popped up entitled “Offbeat Clients Need IVR Too.” The author, Allison Smith, is a well-known IVR voice, and she discussed some of her more interesting IVR voice-over projects. An example:

I voiced an entire IVR system for a dog (“If you are one of Scout’s friends from the neighborhood, bark once..”), and when I voiced the IVR system for a noted Los Angeles divorce attorney and joked that a prominent celebrity who is famous for her multitude of messy divorces should have her own extension, the office administrator who hired me to do the system insisted that I tack that onto the end.

We immediately found ourselves curious about some of the unique voice-overs our IVR voice recording partner GMVoices had been involved with, and reached out to their senior account manager Jay Steinworth to ask about some of their more memorable clients. He didn’t disappoint, and the following are just a few applications he shared:

• May IVR take your order? GMVoices has worked with several clients to set up voice prompts for systems that will take your order for fast food, including error handling and taking payment, including support for “Would you like fries with that?”-type upsells.
• Home cooking: Another GMVoices client makes an oven that you can call up and control by phone, after entering a personal identification number. While typical ovens might have a timer or delayed start, this oven is a better choice for those with erratic schedules: pop in your food in the morning, and it will keep it refrigerated until you call up and set up an appropriate time to cook. Or, if you’ve started baking a dish and subsequently go out to run some errands, you can place a call to check the remaining time or arrange to keep the food warm. You can also remotely turn on the self-cleaning function when the oven’s empty, so that everything’s nice and tidy when you get home.
• For an operator, say or press “Woof”: A client whose business focuses on canine products has a set of traditional voice prompts for its IVR, which it enhanced with “hold” and “closed” messages that were more likely to resonate with its audience.  For example, the “hold” message encourages you to browse their website where you can “sniff out” additional information, and a “closed” message for the Fourth of July references the fun their employees and their pets are probably having at the dog park – and gives customers a subtle reminder that their pets may need some soothing when the holiday fireworks go off.
• Hello? Hola? Allô? How many different languages do you support? For one client, GMVoices had to record prompts in almost 50 languages. Now that’s a commitment to communicating with the customer in a way that resonates with them.
• Stick your left foot in, and shake it all about: This last one is too good to leave out, even if it’s not for an IVR. GMVoices recorded voice instructions for a chain of tanning salons that sound a little bit like the dictation for a game of Twister, such as “Turn right, stand with your left foot on 2 and your right foot on 4″.

The underlying thread behind all of these stories seems to be that the more unique your organization is, the more you need to use a voice and persona for your automated interactions – your customers definitely aren’t robotic, and your self-service tools shouldn’t be, either. This holds true both at the low-end, with fast-food ordering that is likely to attract younger clients, and at the higher-end, with the expectations for high-quality, polished service that would come with an expensive appliance.

Today, Voxeo is excited to announce that we’re enabling our customers to take the mobile experience one step further, by bringing location-based services (LBS) to the Voxeo cloud. LBS makes it easier, safer and more convenient than ever before for mobile customers to access information and services with no need to download an app. Voxeo’s cloud-based solution works on any mobile device and with all major wireless carriers in the US, making the service available to over 350 million mobile devices.

For inbound and outbound interactive voice response systems, SMS and mobile web, the use of Voxeo’s API for location-based services automates a large part of what would otherwise be a tedious, and potentially error-prone process, using location instead of user input to streamline the process of getting the correct information.

A few example cases where mobile location services would be ideal for the end-user:

• Finding a nearby store
• Obtaining roadside assistance
• Checking traffic conditions
• Getting turn by turn directions in real time
• Checking the weather (see our demo below!)

There are also many business cases for LBS, such as:

• Location based advertising, serving specific ads to specific locations, and location marketing, such as a location-based social network pushing special notifications to a potential customer within a particular radius of an establishment
• Identifying fraud, for example, enabling a financial institution to check the location of a caller and queuing additional account challenge questions if the location is not the account holder’s home
• Time tracking for remote, mobile or otherwise unsupervised employees

Want to see Voxeo’s location-based services in action? We’ve set up a quick demo that will pull the weather forecast for where you are! Give it a try:

• Use your mobile phone to give the Voxeo Weather Forecast a call at 412-543-8514
• Authorize the system to use your location

Once our system detects your location, you’ll receive your local weather forecast. You can opt out of the geolocation services at the end of the call, or you can hang up and the system will be able to continue using your location on subsequent calls. (Voice prompts for this demo are provided by our partner GMVoices.)

For the user, this eliminates the need to enter location information into the system and streamlines the process. This example would likely have required US zipcode information in order to be accurate. For services like dispatching roadside assistance or looking up nearby store locations, LBS simplifies the process even more by eliminating the need to enter more granular information (e.g., cross streets or specific addresses).

For developers adding LBS to their applications, Voxeo will work hand-in-hand to ensure your system is compliant with privacy and data security concerns, carrier approval and provisioning. We also support single and double opt-ins, as well as SMS challenge messages to confirm opt-ins. Our development API for location-based services is fully compliant with industry standards as an extension of the Location RESTful API from GSMA’s OneAPI. For more info, please see our developer documentation.

To learn more about location-based services in the Voxeo cloud, and find out how to get started with 1,000 free lookups, visit www.voxeo.com/location-intelligence.

This week our partner Interactivation released a very cool “InteractiveXML” toolkit that lets you create videos where viewers interact with the video via voice, text or other channels.

I can’t really explain it… you really have to see it to understand how incredibly cool this is!

First, check out this video where you can call a phone number and interact with the guy in the video (and yes, this is using Voxeo’s network to power the phone interaction):

It’s quite cleverly done. Also… after you’ve tried it out, reload the page and then ignore it for a while. It’s rather amusing what the character in the video does.

Then you can test your 80′s music knowledge with this video that doesn’t use voice but instead has you press buttons or enter text to answer questions:

And again, if you ignore the screen the character gets rather amusing.

Interactivation has released this new “InteractiveXML” language and service to let people create video applications like these. You can learn more about it at, predictably:

http://www.interactivexml.com/

It’s very cool to see and I’m looking forward to seeing what people may do with this new service. Congrats to the Interactivation team on their launch of InteractiveXML!

There are so many times when I just love the utter simplicity of our services!  I know… DUH! … you expect me to say that.  Sure. But seriously… I was speaking with a reporter at the Voxeo booth at SpeechTEK and she asked the question:

How hard is it to add SMS to an existing voice application?

To which I was delighted to be able to just say:

Let me show you!

I whipped out my laptop, logged into Evolution, and showed her the one single radio button:

Powerful simplicity!  I love it!

We were very pleased to announce at SpeechtTEK this morning in New York that we have extended our 100% Uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) to text messaging (SMS).  For many years, we’ve offered a 100% Uptime SLA for voice/IVR … essentially we believe so strongly in our infrastructure that we’ll credit your account if we have any downtime.  Today we extended that 100% Uptime SLA to text messaging (SMS).

Today, so many companies are starting to use text messaging as a way to communicate with their customers.  However, companies are NOT thinking about the reliability of their text-messaging services. Yet, if text messaging is to be a core part of your customer communication, you really need mission-critical reliability.

That’s what we announced today!

We also explained again our SMS offering and offered a video:

• Outbound Messaging. Allows applications to send outbound text messages and campaign blasts.  Used to provide proactive alerts, send reminders, and allow users to take action on messages, such as accepting an offer, making a payment, or confirming an appointment.  
• Inbound Messaging. Allows applications to receive inbound text messages and automatically reply with requested information, present users with dynamic menus or choices, and route requests appropriately. 
• Normal phone numbers.   Voxeo customers can send messages from and receive messages to “normal” phone numbers, such as (407) 555-1212 in the US.  Phone numbers for the US and other countries around the world are available from Voxeo on-demand, ready in just minutes, with no wait times or significant monthly costs.
• Short-code phone numbers. Voxeo customers can also send and receive text messages using “short code” phone numbers, such as 12345.  Short codes take more time to obtain from mobile carriers but are best for high-volume or high-profile text messaging applications.  Voxeo manages the short code provisioning from start to finish.
• Multi-Modal Interactions.  Companies can also use Voxeo to deliver “multi-modal” applications that use both voice and text in the same customer interaction or with the same phone numbers. For instance, a customer calling to make a payment through an automated voice system could then receive a SMS confirming the transaction.
• Development Simplicity. Voxeo’s easy-to-use tools enable developers to create new SMS text-messaging applications – and to text-enable any existing VoiceXML application with very few or even no changes. In addition, customers can use  Voxeo’s VoiceObjects Application LifeCycle Suite to graphically build one application and seamlessly deploy it across multiple channels including voice, SMS, IM, video, and the mobile web – all while accounting for differences in user interfaces.  Alternatively, customers can use a simple HTTP-based API to send and receive SMS messages.
• 24X7 Monitoring and Support. Voxeo provides unmatched technical support and customer service. Unlike other vendors with limited, tiered, or cost-based support models, Voxeo Customer Obsession teams are available to Voxeo customers for free 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to rapidly resolve issues, answer any questions, and  share best practices.

The short video demonstrates how easy it is to create text messaging apps:

How to Create Text Messaging (SMS) Applications on Voxeo’s Platform

If you would like to try this out yourself, simply go to evolution.voxeo.com, sign up for a free account and check out our tutorials.  And when you are ready to launch you’re application into production, we’ll be glad to talk about our 100% Uptime SLA!

Out at eComm in San Francisco today, Voxeo customer Ringio launched their cloud communications service that gives small and medium businesses the kind of positive customer calling experience you would expect out of a much larger company. I like how this Information Week article explains Ringio:

Just because SMBs can’t afford enterprise-class call center technology doesn’t mean that they don’t have call-center needs every bit as complex as large corporations. Moreover, with smaller customer bases and less entrenched brand recognition, the quality of customer care that SMBs provide, potentially, can have a bigger impact on the bottom line. Bringing the CRM and telephony functionality that enterprises take for granted to SMBs is the premise of the Rich Calling service announced today by Ringio.

Ringio’s news release gives a bit more context for their “Rich Calling Service” and how they see it helping SMBs provide a better customer experience.

I had a chance to interview Ringio CEO Sam Aparicio and in the resulting video you can see in the demo both how easy it is to set up and also what it can do for both the business and customers.

From a caller perspective, I was:

• Given a personalized greeting (you can hear that in the video);
• Promptly connected to someone at the company.

From the company perspective, when my call came in, Sam:

• Received a screen pop with my contact info, recent calls and conversations and other notes. This allows him to very easily see what I’ve been doing and why I might be calling. (In the age of Twitter, I could see one of the links being to someone’s Twitter page where I could simply look at that to see their recent activity.
• Was able to perform basic call functions like Hold and Transfer;
• Was able to see the presence of other people connected to the system and thereby be able to figure out who would be available to take the call;
• Write notes about the call.

Now, sure, you can do this in other premise CRM systems, but this is all out in the cloud and able to be managed through a web interface or through a mobile interface. Ringio has a nice “tour” page that explains how their service is “Far More Than a Small Business Phone System”.

It’s simple and easy to try out… you just have to go do www.ringio.com and sign up…

And if you want to watch Sam and I talking about the service, here’s the video (where he also talks about how Voxeo’s platform is used by the service):

We congratulate Ringio on their launch and look forward to their success!

Why has voice verification historically been so difficult to implement? In an age of identity theft, when companies are looking for additional ways to secure online transactions, why shouldn’t they be able to use voice? In a time when companies are looking for ways to deliver services to customers faster, why shouldn’t they be able to use voice as a way to secure the delivery of those services?

Whether people call it “voice verification”, “voice authentication” or “voice biometrics”, the common question people ask is “Why does using voice for security have to be so hard?”

It doesn’t.

Today we are pleased to announce a new voice biometrics initiative with four of the leading voice biometrics companies where you can add voice biometrics to a new or existing VoiceXML application TODAY. Through the power of the cloud, your application running on our Prophecy Hosting service can securely communicate with the hosted services of CSIdentity, PerSay, TradeHarbor or Vocalect.

If you go to our new biometrics portal page at:

www.voxeo.com/biometrics

you will find links to “How To” documents from each of the four vendors explaining how you can easily integrate their service into a new or existing VoiceXML application. All of the vendors are also making trial accounts available for interested developers. Try one vendor out… try them all out.

The point is that voice biometrics is very real… today… and you can implement security based on voice today on Voxeo’s platform.

Use voice biometrics as a way to securely automate password resets on your corporate LAN… use it as a way to secure an e-commerce transaction… use it as a way to confirm access to confidential information about an order being processed… use it as a way to secure access to your corporate IVR… use it to secure callers into a private conference call… use it for whatever wacky idea your imagination can come up with…

Use it… play with it… the code is out there! If you already have an account on our Evolution developer portal, you can modify an existing VoiceXML application or create a new one. If you don’t have an account, signing up is free and lets you get started right away creating voice applications, complete with inbound phone numbers, Skype numbers and SIP interconnection, as well as outbound dialing, speech recognition, conferencing and much, much, more…

And when you are ready to make your application go live in a production environment, simply contact us and we can get your app running on the industry’s largest VoiceXML hosting cloud and the only one backed by a 100% uptime service level agreement.

Try it out… voice verification is no longer something “too hard” to do… it’s simple and it’s here today!

Please visit our voice biometrics announcement page to watch video interviews with each of the four partners, to read guest blog posts and to find other information about using voice biometrics on Voxeo’s platform.