News

Alivox is speaking your language

Michael Feeley | Wednesday July 16, 2008



Alivox Ltd, a spinout software company from the University of Edinburgh’s world class School of Speech and Language, is hoping that its latest release, ALIS (Automatic Language Identification), can help ease the burden of hard pressed contact centre managers.

The new product addresses the increasing need for contact centre managers to communicate effectively with a multilingual range of callers. Traditionally some operators have received calls with an in-country number which identifies the country of origin – this, in turn, is used to assume the language of the caller. However, while a caller from Italy is suspected to be an Italian speaker: he may in fact be a German calling from Italy, who may not speak Italian. So, the new software tool from Alivox takes a clip of the speaker and identifies the language being spoken in realtime. The call can then be put through to the correct linguist or correct Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system.

Johan du Preez, director of Catchword, a South African Speech Technology company that has assisted Alivox in tests of ALIS, said: “This will help language identification in SA where there are 11 languages, 5 of which are predominant. These are SA English, Afrikaans, Southern Sotho, Zulu and Xhosa. The Alivox Alis solution provides a very rapid, high percentage result in realtime, of the language being spoken. This makes the solution ideally suited for the multilingual call centre sector anywhere in the world.”

David Chisholm of Alivox said: “Spoken Language Identification will eliminate the practice of some call centres that invite the caller to press 1 for this language and 2 for that language when it assumes the caller can understand the language that the welcome message is being spoken in. What if the caller cannot understand the message? The answer is the welcome message must be played in each target language simultaneously shortening the long welcome message. This way the speaker’s language is identified when he answers the welcome message.”

David Chisholm believes that the new ALIS system has countless applications, including offshore call cenetres, local government and emergency service. He said: “The Emergency services do a very good job in handling non English calls, some 1.5% of 999 calls, which are sometimes transferred to an interpretation service, but there could still be a delay if the language is not identified swiftly.”

Alivox’s ALIS solution is not a speech recognition solution, and it does not need a dictionary of foreign language words, but rather it identifies any language or mix of languages from the unique rhythm of that language.


www.alivox.com

Digg this article

Technorati tags: ,

More Articles