Ready-to-use, tailored voice portals available as a managed service for customers
Cologne, Germany; March 02, 2004 – T-Com (the fixed-line subsidiary of Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG) and VoiceObjects AG have teamed up to provide ready-to-use voice applications as a managed service for customers throughout Germany. Using T-Com's new Voice Web Portal, business customers can now offer all their services and information over the telephone. The new portals provide a self-service option for callers, taking some of the workload off company call-centers. This managed service offer includes voice application consulting, design, implementation, and operation via the T-Com infrastructure, as well as high-quality recorded prompts and a state-of-the-art dialog design for highly natural interactions. The Voice Web Portal provides the latest multi-language speech recognition and synthesis software, making web content and services accessible via the telephone.
In this joint venture, VoiceObjects offers its voice application management system (VAMS) VoiceObjects Factory as the enabling technology for the rapid development and efficient operation of voice web applications. VoiceObjects design experts also provide the necessary know-how to build high-quality customized applications with a user-friendly voice interface. T-Com is responsible for marketing and consulting activities for the new service, as well as handling implementation and integration, providing hosting and administration, and maintaining the deployed voice applications. Using Voice Web Portal, companies can now provide telephone access to content and services originally designed for the internet. This allows clients from a wide range of industries such as travel, mail order, online banking, insurance, utilities, telecommunications, and information media to automate a high proportion of their telephone transactions. The reduced load on call center agents not only cuts costs, it also increases the quality of customer service. Agents are freed up to handle more complex customer calls in greater detail, while callers can take care of routine business over the telephone around the clock.
The Voice Web Portal service platform
Using the integrated graphical development environment provided as part of VoiceObjects Factory, designers can create tailored high-quality services to match the client’s corporate identity. Services can even be personalized to the individual caller. "Caller acceptance is crucial for the success of voice portals. This can only be achieved with an engaging and highly user-friendly interface. Simply reading the contents of an existing web page out loud is not enough. Web pages are, after all, visual media, but interaction with a voice portal depends on speech and hearing," explains Karl-Heinz Land, CEO of VoiceObjects AG.
VoiceObjects Factory integrates with e-business systems such as SAP or Siebel, which may already be used by the client, and is able to re-use existing business logic and processes. It also provides standardized interfaces to web applications and to the corresponding content databases. VoiceObjects Factory tailors the presentation and rendering of all content for the telephone channel, via a Voice User Interface. Customers can now have telephone access to services which were previously only available online.
"With our VoiceObjects Factory VAMS, T-Com is now able to offer every customer a solution tailored to meet their individual needs. This platform will set new standards for quality, performance, and flexibility in voice-driven services," sums up Land.
