Envox Development Platform Powers 'EVA’
WESTBOROUGH, Mass. – Quentris, one of Europe's largest voice, data and image convergence specialists, has chosen Envox Worldwide’s Envox Communications Development Platform to develop and deploy a sophisticated automated speech attendant persona known as EVA (electronic voice assistant).
Positioned as a virtual receptionist and personal assistant, EVA connects internal and external callers to their destination quickly and efficiently. Quentris was able to develop EVA in just two-and-a-half months using the Envox Communications Development Platform.
EVA uses high-quality, natural language, multilingual speech recognition and text-to-speech technology to communicate with callers in English, French, or Dutch. It records callers' language preferences using a 'caller card' system that ensures that all future calls are automatically conducted in the appropriate language.
Callers are able to ask for a department, service, or individual by name in a free-text format that accepts the use of abbreviations and nicknames. If the requested party is not available, EVA provides a dynamic list of options for each destination, such as transferring the caller to a personal assistant, mobile phone, voicemail or a live operator. If the call takes place outside of working hours, EVA automatically recognizes the time of the call and responds with an appropriate message. Thanks to a 'barge-in' function, callers can interrupt EVA at any point to request help, or to opt-out of the system and speak with a live operator.
Existing staff directories can be imported into the system to enable immediate operation, and administrators can update phonetic information for difficult names to ensure accurate pronunciation in all three languages. Users can personalize and change settings such as call forwarding destinations from any phone.
Additional features such as advanced time-of-day management, personalized greetings, customized on-hold music, personal directories, caller announcements and call-back requests are currently being developed. Existing users will be able to access these new features on request.
"From a technological point of view, the Envox Communications Development Platform simplifies the creation of telephony, text-to-speech, and advanced speech recognition solutions," said Peter Edel, advanced technology manager, Quentris. "Working with the Envox platform enables us to focus our attention on the needs of our customers; we do not have to spend our time resolving technical issues and working out how to do things. Furthermore, since Envox offers a wide array of integration features, speech applications such as EVA can be easily adapted to many other standards like LDAP, XML and database access. If we want to integrate EVA with mobile applications and e-mail for example, we can quickly do so thanks to the existing capabilities of the Envox Communications Development Platform."
EVA is already being used by BASF Belgium. BASF uses EVA as its virtual receptionist, handling calls from external callers and as an automated attendant. EVA enables employees to contact one another simply by saying a name. BASF's live operator switches incoming calls over to EVA during lunch breaks, after hours, and at any time when a heavy call load requires back-up.