Transforming Contact Centers with Speech and IP

Jack Chase, Director of Product Management , NMSRob Kassel, Senior Manager, Network Speech Products, Nuance

Slide 2

Agenda The Evolution of Contact Centers

Business trends Architectures

Speech Technology Update — Rob Kassel, Nuance MRCP-enabled speech

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Slide 3

Contact Center Evolution

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Slide 4

Single anddistributed sites

Some use of IVRU and ACD

Screen pops

Some call routing via ACD

Evolution of Contact Centers: Business Trends

First Generation Second Generation Third Generation

Hardware-basedCost Center

Integration andTechnology

Solving BusinessProblems:Profit Center

Stand-alone sites

Limited PBX routing

Customer talks into phone Agent types into computer

Virtual Call Center

IVRU & ACD integration

Multi-media access: Email, fax, web

Integrated ERP/CRM

Skills-based routing

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Slide 5

The Obvious Cost Savings Target

Agent Costs66%

Telecom Costs15%

Outsourced Calls7% Technology

12%

Source: Benchmark Portal, 2002

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Slide 6

The Cost of Customer Interactionis Reduced with Self Service

Web

IVR

Chat Phone

Email

$0.24 $0.45

$5.00

$7.00$5.50

$0.00

$2.00

$4.00

$6.00

$8.00

$10.00

$12.00

$14.00

$16.00

Assisted Service

Self-Service

$40

Source: Gartner Group, 2002

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Slide 7

Evolution of Contact Centers: Technology Trends Self-service using web, ASR and TTS is

reducing the dependency on live agents; costs Web, email, and messaging are freely mixed

with phone calls in a single queue Network based contact centers are becoming a

significant phenomenon VoIP is lowering system costs at the agent and

between system components By 2007, 30% of contact center agents will be on VoIP

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Slide 8

Circuit-Based Contact Center

ACD

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CTI

IVR

PSTN

CircuitData

CRM

Slide 9

VoIP in an IP Contact Center

Site A

Site BIP-PBX

CRM

Contact Center(ACD+CTI

+IVR+Speech)

PSTN

Self-Service

Operations Center

VOIP

CircuitDataVOIP

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Slide 10

Upgrading with MRCP and VXML

Site A

Site BIP-PBX

CRM

PSTN

Operations Center

CircuitDataVOIP

Media Server

Application Server

VXML Server

Speech Server

MRCP

RTP

SIP, CCXML

VXML

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Slide 11

Speech Technology Update

Rob Kassel, Senior Manager, Network Speech Products, Nuance

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The Need For Speech Recognition DTMF often is used for customer self-service

Numeric entry is easy… unless you are reading Spelling entry is more difficult Menus need to be enumerated, can’t be too long Deep menu structure becomes tiresome Assignment inconsistent between vendors (e.g., voicemail) How do you enter “5 ½%” or “Albuquerque”?

With speech, questions are answered naturally Caller satisfaction is higher Fewer zero-outs leads to additional cost savings

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Slide 13

Speech Recognition Process

FeatureExtraction

SpeechDetector

ConfidenceScoring

Speech

Results

Grammar

GrammarCompiler

SystemDictionary

PronunciationRules

PhonemeClassifier Acoustic

Models

Search

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Slide 14

Speech Recognition Challenges Processor and memory demands Speech can be difficult to decode, even for humans

Fixed, confusable vocabularies: “B-C-D-E-G-P-T-V-Z” Ambiguous boundaries: “It’s hard to wreck a nice beach!”

Speaker variability: dialect, volume, gender, etc. Noise rejection: hands-free, mobile, telematics Out-of-vocabulary rejection & confidence measures Callers don’t always say what you might expect…

Yes or no?

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Slide 15

Speech Recognition: State of the Art Callers speak naturally in directed dialogs High accuracy, infrequent confirmation Million-word vocabularies:

stocks, proper names, street addresses Scripting to control values returned to application:

“half past three” can return “1530” or “afternoon” Open-ended responses, especially for call routing

Allows for questions like “How may I help you?” Based on statistical methods trained from examples

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Slide 16

The Need For Text-To-Speech Professional recordings best for fixed content Word concatenation is difficult to do well

Often used for numeric output Can sound mechanical; irritating when frequent

Large output vocabularies fairly common(e.g. city names)

Some applications defy recordings(e.g. messaging)

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Slide 17

TTS Text Analysis

PronunciationGeneration

TextNormalization

Source Text

Annotated Text

SystemDictionary

PronunciationRules

ProsodyGeneration

“Are you there?” are + you + there + <question>$31 thirty one dollarsATM eh tee em NATO nay-tohA.M. eh em CUL8R see you later

HomographDisambiguation

minute = 60 seconds minute = tinyDr. Jones doctor jones Jones Dr. jones drive11210 eleven thousand two hundred ten (number)11210 one one two one oh (ZIP code)

Determine which words require emphasisInsert pauses based on phrase boundaries, lung capacityAssign duration, pitch, and volume to each phoneme

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Slide 18

TTS Waveform Generation

Can mimic natural speech if parameters are set by hand

In practice sounds somewhat robotic, the “drunken Swede”

Can produce a variety of voicesExtremely compact

Units can be smaller or larger than a phoneme

Database tends to be very largePreserves speaker characteristics

and speaking style of voice talent

Annotated Text

Speech

VoiceDatabase

UnitSelection

Concatenateand Smooth

Annotated Text

Speech

ParameterGeneration

Vocal TractModel

Parametric Concatenative

FEMALE FEMALE CHILDwww.nuance.com

Slide 19

Text-to-Speech: State of the Art Naturalness of concatenative TTS is generally

preferred for call center applications …but voice talent takes direction, more expressive Custom voices to maintain brand identity Use one voice talent for both recordings and TTS

Seamlessly mix dynamic data with static prompts Apply prompt “patches” rapidly until

cost of recording session can be justified

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Slide 20

Designing Speech Applications Observe & interview call center agents Listen to calls, develop caller profiles

Who are they? What do they know? Where are they calling from? What are their goals? What are their priorities?

Determine business objectives & rules Define speech user interface

Call flows Prompt wording Error recovery; help and instructions Anthropomorphism and persona

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MRCP and Natural Access

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What is MRCP v1?

Speech servers are connected by VoIP to IVR servers Standard API for ASR and TTS Easy to reconfigure system as needs change Easy to implement redundancy

Control: MRCP/ RTSP/ TCP/ IP

Speech: G.711/ RTP/ UDP/ IP MRCP Server

Speech

ServersIP

PSTN IVR

ServersIVR

ServersSpeech

Servers

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Slide 23

Natural Access and MRCP

Service Managers, Libraries

Driver Driver Driver IPC

Call Control

CX Boards AG Boards CG Boards PacketMediaHMP

SNMP

HMP

PCI PCI PCI IP

IVRServices

PSTNTrunking

VoIP(Fusion)

Conferencing

FaxServices

USAI(MRCP)

OAM

VideoAccess

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Universal Speech Access Makes Speech Integration Easy

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Slide 25

Current Support for Universal Speech Access

Vendor Type Universal Speech Access 1.0

Universal Speech Access 1.1

Nuance ASR MRCP Server SP5 Nuance 8.5

MRCP Server SP7 Nuance 8.5

Nuance(ScanSoft)

ASR OSMS 2.0.1OSR 2.0

SWMS 3.1OSR 3.0

Nuance TTS Vocalizer 3.0 Vocalizer 3.0.8

Nuance(ScanSoft)

TTS OSMS 2.0.1Speechify 2.0

SWMS 3.1RealSpeak 4.0

Telisma ASR Philsoft 3.2 teliSpeech 1.0 SP4

Loquendo ASR N/A Loquendo ASR LSS 6.0

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Slide 26

What’s Next for MRCP? MRCP v2

draft-ietf-speechsc-mrcpv2-06, Feb 20, 2005 Adds SIP/SDP for session setup

Replaces RTSP Adds support for speaker verification Little deployment yet NMS will update USAI when deployments occur

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Questions?

Contact Info:jack_chase@nmss.comrob.kassel@nuance.com