Use Your Mouth Not Your Finger

THE CHALLENGE

You call the main number of a company to contact a person whose extension you don't know. You are greeted with a familiar recording: "for a company directory press 'four'," followed by the command, "enter the first few letters of the person's last name. For the letter Q use the 'seven' key and for the letter Z use the 'nine' key."

What if you don't know how to spell the person's last name, or you're using a cell phone and traveling at sixty miles an hour? What if your telephone keypad only indicates the numbers and not the alphabet?

THE SOLUTION

The solution is provided by Voice Control Systems (VCS), a leading global supplier of speech recognition and related technologies. VCS has developed an automated attendant capable of recognizing the full name of the person you are calling, or the department you wish to reach. Connection to any PBX or voice mail system is easy. Once installed, callers can use conversational English to state the name of the employee or department at any time during the playing of the greeting or prompt. The ASR automated attendant is ideal for companies with PBX/voice mail systems serving up to 500 employees per site.

The ASR automated attendant is not only user friendly, it saves money and is easier to update than a printed directory. Since names and extensions can be added, modified, and deleted through the use of a single software vocabulary builder tool, you won't need to distribute monthly printed phone directories. If your company uses an number, the time that a caller wastes while fumbling with a DTMF keypad trying to spell an employee's name is costing you money. In addition, the ASR automated attendant provides virtual DID using a normal CO trunk line, eliminating the expense and inconvenience of DID. Future enhancements to the system may include voice-mail navigation ("read my messages for today") or outbound voice activated dialing ("get me Christine Dupont at Infosys").

You can build this application on the CT platform or you can buy a turnkey system and installation from VCS.