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FEATURE: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
WE ARE DELIVERING ENTIRELY NEW
WAYS FOR VOICE TO BE INTUITIVELY
LEVERAGED ACROSS ALL TOUCH POINTS.
need skills in other languages and drive help
and assistance especially in the services
industry for people who need help in Chinese
or various other languages.
What they require is platforms that integrate
technologies that do real time translation. So
you could come to Dubai and you only speak
German, the Dubai government services
might not have a German speaker but what
you can do is naturally speak German. The
agent automatically gets a transcription of
that German into English and can respond
back to you and you hear German back. So
that’s a real time translation element.
Are there any particular verticals
that this tool is aimed at?
We do have vertical specific demos but at
the end of the day if a customer needs that
service we will deliver it. My own personal
opinion is that you will see it adopted
mainly in government entities. You’ll see
immigration services and frontline citizen
help services using it.
As you know old cities like London have a
number of people that don’t speak English
and this would be phenomenal to provide
help and assistance to people of that nature
and assimilate them in to the environment or
the city in a much faster manner by providing
services and their need of languages.
Intelligent CIO spoke to Savio Tovar Dias,
Senior Director Sales Engineering, Avaya, to
find out more.
Can you tell us how Avaya’s real time
translation tool works please?
These technologies help us deliver much
better customer service. We are delivering
business outcomes that solve real customer
problems. One of the things we see is that
many of our customers deliver service in a
couple of languages. But as usual you might
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How can the voice be used as a key
user interface?
Everybody goes down the path of least
resistance and what has happened is we’ve
seen this migration where you used to call in
to a contact centre but then it just became
simpler to text and everybody seems to be
able to text.
What we’re seeing is the adoption of
the new wave of voice technologies and
using consumer devices like Alexa, Google
Home and Apple Smart Home to provide
services for yourself. You’re sitting in your
home, you’re on your couch and chatting
with your bank. You could just say ‘Alexa
connect me to my bank please’ and Alexa
will reach out to the bot in the bank and
then start to communicate with your bank
or the flower shop or any other service that
you might need.
People tend to prefer to contact
customer services by phone. Is it
because they distrust technology?
I think that is changing. If you look at all
industry trends you’re beginning to see a
number of channels such as social media,
the web chats and Facebook Messenger
that are more accepted.
With the voice channel you’re beginning to
see more critical issues come in. Providers
have alternate channels to do their regular
information queries but when it’s a
critical ask or there’s an escalation people
don’t want to scream at a bot they want
to scream at a human being but we’re
beginning to see this channel used for more
critical issues.
So there’s a growing acceptance of
chatbots etc?
Yes. There is because in many instances
there’s a maturity of these technologies that
means you might not realise that you’re
actually talking to a bot.
Can you tell me about how you’ve
been delivering voice enabled virtual
assistants for enterprises?
Speech technologies have gotten more
mature. They provide you with an element
of AI and virtual assistance that can help
you through your work day. The adoption
should be easier because it is rather simple
to use. n
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