Interactive Chat Response Systems

The chat bots have arrived. Well at least thats what popular media wants you to believe. The mental image we get when we hear about Chatbots is that of some sentient program which will converse seamlessly with humans and solve our problems.

Well, version 1 of the chatbots are anything but. Because the chatbots have been so overhyped, people seem to expect a lot from them. The fact of the matter is that chat is just another medium and we still have a long way to go before computer programs understand you and answer your queries.

But thats ok.
What we have now is a step forward. Most chatbots I have encountered are nothing more than glorified "if-then-else" programs. But as long as they answer my queries, I am happy.

So, instead of calling them chatbots, maybe if we call them Interactive Chat Response Systems(ICRs),maybe people will have lesser expectations and follow the on screen prompts and get their queries resolved.

ICRs have some advantages over IVRs. Since you can use text and images and even video, an ICR can solve a lot more problems. And since most web based systems are also text based, integrating an ICR with a backend system is much more easier. The UI/UX of an ICR is also much more natural and lesser error prone than an IVR where you have to press tones many times.

Go ahead, you can converse with our Ozonetel ICR system here

Cloud Telephony-History and state of the art

Well, its been 11 years since Twilio launched their voice API in November 2008. I would say that was a major turning point in the cloud telephony industry. Before that, for people to build telephony applications, you either had to depend on proprietary platforms like Avaya dialog designer or build on arcane technologies like VXML which again was supported at varying degrees by the incumbents. Enter Twilio with their voice API and the industry changed for the better. Since it's been almost 11 years now I thought now might be a good time to do a comprehensive review of the cloud telephony industry as a whole in general and in India in particular. The Beginning Twilio was undoubtedly the startup which ushered in the era of cloud telephony. They started in November 2008. At that time in India, we at Ozonetel had launched a hosted VXML platform. There were no takers. After all who coded in VXML :) So when Twilio launched and we saw them take off, we immediately realized tha...

Google business messages and chat agents-A match made in heaven

Google has launched Google business messages without much fanfare. It's just a small button that pops up when someone searches for your business on Google. But from the conversation industry perspective this is HUGE . Do you know that the small call button drives millions of calls i n a year for pizza joints and other retailers in the US. Businesses spend more than a trillion dollars supporting billions of customer service calls each year. Now imagine how many chat conversations the "Message" button can drive. Think of how customers interact with business. 1. Search on Google. 2. Click on web site link. 3. Web site shows chat pop up and tries to force the user to chat.(Annoying. I know :)) 4. User clicks on chat and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. This flow can now be completely changed. The new flow can be: 1. Search on Google. 2. User clicks on Message and starts conversing with a bot or an agent. What if you could design a customer experience that helps...

Telugu ASR speech data collection

Image Source: IIIT-H Developing an indigenous ASR for Indian languages has been a goal for us since a long time. In that regard we have been experimenting a lot, trying out various neural network architectures. While doing these experiments we found that there was no good dataset for Indian languages. While discussing with IIIT professors we got to know that the government of India was also exploring options to generate a good dataset. We immediately offered our help and our platform for this endeavor. So, as a starting step we have come up with a few campaigns to encourage users to donate speech data. We wanted to make it fun, so our first few campaigns are along the lines of JAMs(Just a Minute speech topics) etc. A topic will be provided and you need to speak for a minute on that topic. We have started this campaign for college students to start with. Of course anyone can participate and contribute their data. The more the merrier :) We will adding a lot more innovative ways ut...

Cloud Telephony Experiments

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