Altitude Software Offers Advanced Natural Language Self-Service Experience for Contact Centers
Altitude Software, Loquendo and SpeechVillage Partner to Expand Advanced Speech Self-Service Offering
Natural Language Technology Helps Large Bank Track Debtors in Latin America
Lisbon, Portugal, 23 February 2011 – Altitude Software, a leading independent global contact centre solutions vendor, Loquendo, a global speech technology provider, and SpeechVillage, a leader in graphical tools for speech applications, announced today an expansion of their joint offering. This strategic partnership provides new solutions with next generation natural language technology to voice-enable self-service options for a broad range of advanced contact centre solutions.
These natural language technology solutions enable Altitude customers to use Altitude Voice Portal for both inbound and outbound voice interactions with customers, for a natural dialogue with virtual agents, even in noisy environments. “We are particularly proud of this combined offering. User friendly voice applications require expertise, technologies and tools”, explains Miguel Lopes, Executive Vice President of Altitude Software. “Combined with other contact channels in Altitude uCITM, as part of a customer self-service solution, natural language technologies not only improve the user experience but also allow agents to focus on other, more value-added tasks”, he adds.
Improving User Experience in Customer Self-Service New Applications
The joint offering integrates the Loquendo MRCP Server, certified to work with Altitude Voice Portal. The Loquendo MRCP Server is a server-based solution for large-scale deployments of automated telephony applications integrating Loquendo multilingual speech technologies, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text To Speech (TTS), in order to give a real human touch to automated communications. “The Altitude Voice Portal, combined with Loquendo’s innovative speech technology, and SpeechVillage’s Dialogue Engine is a time and cost-effective solution that maintains high levels of customer satisfaction, while service productivity also improves and the contact centre increases its value to the operation“, stated Massimiliano Ferrero, EMEA Director at Loquendo.
It also employs the SpeechVillage dialogue engine, which is capable of increasing the callers’ freedom to express their requests verbally at any point. This technology allows managing spontaneous voice questions and answers, making the dialogue capability of the system similar to that of a human being. “SpeechVillage’s Virtual Agents talk with the user in a very natural way and in real life conditions (noisy environment, use of hand free mobiles, etc). Our advanced dialogue engine is capable of managing complex utterances, semantic disambiguation, context switching and natural commands offering a totally new user experience.”, explained Walter Battistetti CEO of SpeechVillage. “Altitude offers a complete contact centre suite, so contact centres can rely on the best speech technology for automation but also count on transparent transfer to human agents, having the best of both worlds”, concluded Walter highlighting the importance of this partnership.
Natural Language Technology Helps Large Bank Track Debtors in Latin America
In order to maximize its debt collection operations, a large global bank deployed the Altitude Voice Portal solution for outbound calls, with natural language capabilities, in Latin America. The return on the investment of the entire solution was achieved in four months.
This financial group provides investment banking, consumer credit, real estate financing, leasing, foreign exchange and foreign trade financing services. As debtors are becoming more mobile and difficult to reach, the outbound automated speech services are used to proactively call the customer and identify/verify his/her identity, before other applications or collector agents handle the next steps of the debt recovery process call. In fact, entire transactions can be carried out without the use of human operators, allowing agents’ time to be better used for more complex interactions.
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About Altitude
Altitude Software (www.altitude.com ) is the leader of unified customer interaction solutions, managing dynamic contact centres independently of platforms since 1993. Used by 250.000 users in about 900 customers of 60 countries, Altitude is recognized for customer satisfaction levels and is ISO 9001 and TSIA certified for its customer support worldwide. Its innovations have won 40+ industry awards and Gartner includes Altitude in its Magic Quadrant, as the only global independent vendor since 2000.
Altitude uCITM (unified customer interactions) is an open software suite that manages high volume customer interactions with the enterprise like Customer Service, Help Desk, Collections, Telesales, Surveys, etc; It is valued the most for its speed in creating and changing CRM Services and Campaigns, thanks to its Unified Design Studio, Open Desktop, Routing, Dialler, Voice Portal, Monitoring, Reporting, Workforce and Integration Server. Altitude Software can be reached at +1 877 4744499 or emailed to info@altitude.com
Follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/Altitudesoft ), Linkedin (www.linkedin.com/companies/altitude-software ) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/altitudesoftware ).
About Loquendo
Awarded Speech Industry ‘Market Leader’ for the past four consecutive years, Loquendo provides a complete range of speech technologies for telephony, mobile, automotive, embedded and desktop solutions – in 31 languages with 75 voices, and constantly growing.
Loquendo TTS and Loquendo ASR empower people to interact with technology in the most natural way possible – using their voice – creating a next-generation client experience while saving businesses millions each year. Also integrable via the Loquendo MRCP Server and VoxNauta VoiceXML, CCXML & SCXML platform, Loquendo speech technologies power millions of calls every day in the telecommunications and enterprise markets across the globe.
Loquendo TTS and ASR are also deployed in more than 20 million devices worldwide in embedded, automotive and mobile environments. Loquendo is a Telecom Italia company headquartered in Turin, Italy, with offices in the US, UK, Spain, Germany and France, and a global network of partners. For more info, and to hear Loquendo TTS for yourself, go to www.loquendo.com.
About Speech Village
SpeechVillage is specialized in the development of advanced natural language understanding systems (both for telephone and web chats). Thanks to its innovative graphical tools, Speechvilage is capable of developing very complex dialogues in a fraction of the time usually needed by a traditional approach. Thanks to post processing proprietary algorithms we guarantee unparalleled performance in managing complex open prompt dialogues even in very noisy environments. SpeechVillage dialogue technology has been chosen by AT&T Shannon Laboratories for the development of an advanced goal oriented customer care service for IEEE.
For more information:
Altitude Software
Carlos Taveira
Get Global Marketing Communications
Tel.: +351 213502551
Email: carlos.taveira@getglobal.pt
Loquendo
Ornella Ambrois
ornella.ambrois@loquendo.com
Phone: +39 011 291 3423
SpeechVillage
Walter Battistetti
walter.battistetti@speechvillage.com
