Automatons with attitude
When customers call home shopping company JD Williams, they are greeted by 25-year-old Patsy Taylor from Chester, who takes them through the process of making an order or payment. In her spare time Patsy, who has a very slight regional accent, likes jogging and going to the cinema with friends.
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But Patsy does not actually exist, despite the wealth of personal detail that JD Williams managers know about her. She is a virtual agent; the software that understand and respond to what customers say.
Patsy’s voice and persona are one of 200 created by Fluency Voice Technology, a speech recognition company, to reflect the image a company wants to project about itself and the type of person that its customers respond best to.
Speech recognition systems have suffered in the past from being seen as automation taken a step too far. But as customers get increasingly irritated at
dealing with foreign call
centre operators, or the limitations of listening to a list of pre-set menu options, which may or may not include the reason they are calling, speech recognition is undergoing a resurgence.
It is most often used in conjunction with live operators
