Altitude Software, a leading independent global contact center solutions vendor, Loquendo, a global speech technology provider, and SpeechVillage, a leader in graphical tools for speech applications, announced 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 center 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 center 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 center suite, so contact centers 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.