Portfolio News

Back

Rhetorical announces new Call Center Suite

Packaged text-to-speech solution for all spoken output

August 2004

Rhetorical, the leading developer of text-to-speech (TTS) technology, has announced a new product designed specifically for the call centre market. The Call Center Suite comprises several enhancements to Rhetorical's text-to-speech technology to ensure perfect speech output for call centre applications. The Call Center Suite also makes it easier for application developers and call centre managers to implement speech synthesis technology in the call centre. It allows them to automate a wide range of telephone interactions, such as bank customers requesting account information or making a payment, book club customers calling in to inform the club of a change of address, travel agencies automating the way they deal with brochure requests, or dental practices automatically phoning patients to remind them of their appointment.

The Call Center Suite deals with spoken output issues that are common across such applications. Extensive lexicons ensure that names of people, streets and places in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand are pronounced accurately. This includes abbreviations like "Dr Jones" or "Holyrood Rd". Sophisticated processing rules make sure that telephone numbers, credit card numbers or monetary amounts are read out accurately and intelligibly. And specialized modules make sure that addresses and postal codes are read the way agents would read them.

The Call Center Suite also contains a library of ActivePrompts™. This is a patented technique which allows prompts (like "Welcome to Acme Banking! How can I help you today") to be created using rVoice text-to-speech while still giving it exactly the intonation and style you would expect from live prompts. These ActivePrompts™ can be combined with other prompts, or with dynamic information, in a seamless text-to-speech process, in any one of Rhetorical's voices. The Call Center Suite contains a collection of such prompts; by using rVoice Studio, the prompts can be modified further. This makes it easy to build and update call center applications for specific customers, without the need to bring in the voice talent each time an application needs to be changed or updated.

By using Rhetorical's high quality text-to-speech, it becomes possible to automate certain types of call center functionality, thereby reducing the cost of providing call centre services to customers. Because customers are not kept waiting for someone to deal with their routine call, their overall customer service experience improves. And automation allows call center agents to be deployed on more interesting calls.

The Call Center Suite adds to this the ability to develop applications faster and more cost effectively than has been possibly up to now.

Marc Moens, CEO of Rhetorical said: "This is a new development in Rhetorical's product offering. The Call Center Suite demonstrates the power of domain-specific text-to-speech. The way call center functionality has been packaged into a single product also makes it easy for application developers to now use text-to-speech as the core of their applications call centre or customer services applications.

There is still a perception in the market that using prerecorded prompts will yield higher quality speech applications than using text-to-speech. With the Call Center Suite we can show that the quality of the applications can be just as good, or better, while being easier to deploy, and more attractive for customers."

For full press release:
www.rhetorical.com/tts-en/company/press/pressrelease040311.html

For further information:

Ruth Smith
Rhetorical Systems
Tel: +00 131 525 6845
Email: ruth@rhetorical.com

Pentech Ventures
David Armour
Tel: +44 (0)141 572 7303
Email: david@pentechvc.com