Altitude Software Offers Advanced Natural Language Experience

– Altitude Software, Loquendo and SpeechVillage Expand Offering in Advanced Speech Self-Service
– Natural Language Technology Helps Largest Latin America Bank To Track Debtors

Brussels, Belgium, 22 February 2011 – Altitude Software , a leading independent global contact centre solutions vendor, Loquendo , a global speech technology provider, and SpeechVillage , leader in graphical tools for speech applications, announced today an expansion of their joint offerings and partnership. This strategic partnership will provide new solutions with next generation natural language technology to voice-enable self-service options for a broad range of advanced contact centre solutions.

This generation of natural language technology allows 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. The solution is being presented in Europe at ContactCenterWorld2011 in Berlin, on Feb.22 to 24 (Hall 1 / A15).

“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 uCI 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.

The Loquendo MRCP Server is certified to work with Altitude Voice Portal. 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.

“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 centre increases its value to the operation”, stated Massimiliano Ferrero, EMEA Director at Loquendo.

SpeechVillage has a dialogue engine 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 centre suite, so contact centres 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 Helps Largest Bank In Latin America To Track Debtors This solution is being deployed in various geographical regions, including Europe and Latin America. Banco Itaú is one of the 15 largest banks in the world, managing total assets above €250 billion Euro for 15 million customers throughout the Americas, Asia and Europe. This financial group provides investment banking, consumer credit, real estate financing, leasing, foreign exchange and foreign trade financing services.

In order to maximize its debt collection operations, the bank deployed Altitude Voice Portal for outbound calls, with natural language capabilities. The return on the investment of the entire solution was achieved in 4 months.

As debtors are more mobile and difficult to reach, the outbound automated speech services are used to proactively call the customer and identify and verify his/her identity, before other applications or collector agents handle the next steps of the debt recovery process. Entire transactions can be carried out without the use of human operators, allowing agents’ time to be better used for more complex interactions.