Cloud Telephony Experiments

 Google has been making silent moves in the business communication space. Google has mostly lost the instant messaging wars. But it does not want to lose the business communication war. WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have been making their own moves to enable businesses to reach their customers through their channels. Its all about who has control over the communication channels. Especially communication which leads to business. That's where the money is. Currently, Google is the king of search and most online transactions start with a Google search. FB, Amazon, Apple and others want to change that. They want the search to start on their properties. And they have started making the moves. WhatsApp business allows small businesses to conduct their transactions on WhatsApp. FB and Instagram have long supported small businesses to manage their business on their channels. Apple has also made some nice moves with Apple business chat. They have integrated a whole shopping expe...

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...

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...

Contact centers have been using social media as a channel for a while now. They use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Google+ to connect with leads and customers. But, have you ever thought of using WhatsApp? I get it – WhatsApp is a simple messaging app and it does not have the same functionality that other social networks have.  But, that shouldn’t stop you from exploring this channel. WhatsApp has more than1 billion active users. This is more than any other messaging app in the world. Plus, WhatsApp is the fastest growing social network. It is the number one messaging app in India, Brazil, and South Africa.  I know that WhatsApp is not a social network, but when you start a conversation with a prospect, the prospect will see your company’s name and contact details right under your contact details. This is a great way to start a conversation with your prospect and to set the tone for future interactions.  Plus, since WhatsApp is a messaging app, sales reps can send ...

WhatsApp is slowly opening up the business API. Even now its not a straight forward process and you need to go through hoops or work with a partner to get the business API access. But lets say you are one of the lucky ones and have got access to the business API.(or you can talk to us and we will get you started). You now want to start providing support to your customers on the WhatsApp channel. What are some important points to remember? Do you need to do anything special? What are its advantages? What are its disadvantages? In this blogpost I will try to answer these questions. Its just another channel: WhatsApp maybe the most used messaging platform in the world, but for your business, its just another channel. Deal with it like you would any other channel. It has the advantages of a chat channel(asynchronous, multiple chats can be handled by a single agent, share photos etc) with the added advantage that your customers need not install any new chat widgets or get used to a...

Ever since we introduced cloud telephony to India in 2009, Ozonetel has always been known as the go to startup for cloud telephony requirements like cloud call centers and virtual numbers. Voice has been our mainstay for a long time and it will continue to be so in the future too. But starting this month, we at Ozonetel have decided to have an increased focus on text based communication channels in addition to voice channels. It's not that we did not support these channels earlier. We already supported, chat and some email functionality. But it has been in bits and pieces only. But starting this month text channels, including email, chat and social media will become First Class Citizens in our stack. They will get the same love that our voice channels get. Unsplash           To achieve this we have planned several upgrades to our platform which will unfold over the coming weeks. Here is a sneak peak of what we are planning. Built in Contact Manager: This has bee...

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...

Ever since WhatsApp launched their business API last year, businesses have been waiting to enable the WhatsApp support channel. WhatsApp has slowly been rolling out API support to select businesses. Though most use cases have been around chat bots, there is a good use case for human agent support on the WhatsApp channel. We at Ozonetel were one of the first companies which enabled agent support for the WhatsApp channel as soon as the business API released. You can read more about it at https://blog.kookoo.in/2018/08/kookoo-contact-center-integration-with.html. Today we have improved the integration by connecting with Zendesk. So if you are serving your customers using Zendesk, you can easily enable WhatsApp channel for your customers. Your customers can chat with your agents directly on WhatsApp. We already have one of the best CTI integrations with Zendesk which you can install from the Zendesk marketplace, https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/kookoo/ The same app can now be ...

Well, it's finally here. The number masking API. To be fair, KOOKOO has supported number masking since when we launched the <dial> tag and already a lot of our customers use our number masking services. But this launch makes it easier for new developers to use the virtual number services. Instead of building a full KOOKOO app and hosting it, you can just call the API. Flickr What is it? Number mask API allows you to create conversation sessions between your customers and your mobile workforce without revealing their personal phone numbers. Create virtual phone numbers instantly with this API. Who can use this? Any business which needs to protect the privacy of its customers and it's employees will find this API useful. For example, ride hailing services a-la Uber, Ola etc can use this API to create virtual number sessions per ride. Delivery services like Zomato, Foodpanda, Swiggy etc can use this API to create virtual numbers on demand per delivery. How can...

WhatsApp announced the launch of their business API yesterday. This is a big deal. A lot of businesses have been asking for WhatsApp integration and now its a possibility. Twilio has already launched an integration . Won't be long before we see a lot more integrations pop up. The most obvious use case is for support chat bots, alerts and reminders. But we at Ozonetel believe one other use case will become the dominant use case, WhatsApp as a support channel with human agents. We believe WhatsApp will become a dominant channel in contact centers world wide. There are multiple reasons for this: WhatsApp is ubiquitous. Everyone has the app. WhatsApp interface is well known to all customers. It is feature rich. You can share audio, video, location etc in the app itself. You can integrate bots for repetitive tasks. Being the leaders in cloud contact center solutions, we at Ozonetel knew that we had to integrate with the WhatsApp channel as early as possible....

TLDR: The data sets used for the testing in the experiments are the digit examples from the Google speech commands dataset . Experiment 1: Converted dataset to 8Khz to fit the telephony format. Google API accuracy: 74.3% Kookoo Zena accuracy: 92.4% We felt the accuracy for Google dropped down because of the 8Khz format. So we did another experiment for Google speech API. Experiment 2: Original speech command dataset Google API accuracy: 85.6% The Long version: At Ozonetel, we are constantly innovating and we are back again with a new speech model after the Yes/No model. We all saw Google demo Duplex last week and it was a pretty cool demo. Just to put things in perspective, though the demo was cool, we think we are still some a ways away from actually having a system operate as smoothly as shown in the demo. We come to the conclusion mainly based on our experiments with the Google speech API. Unless Google is using some model other than the one exposed publicly ...

Unless you have been living under a rock, you know by now that Google announced Google Duplex and took the world over by storm. One of the main building blocks of the Google Duplex system is its natural sounding TTS(text to speech) engine. Though, Google has not opened up those exact voices as a service, they have enabled a lot of great sounding text to speech voices as part of their cloud speech service . And as of today, KooKoo supports the Google TTS engine. You can now use Google TTS voices to power your IVR flows and make them more natural sounding. Adding Google TTS to your IVR is as simple as just adding an attribute type="ggl" in your <playtext> tags . And the best news of all, this service is free on KooKoo till August 2018. So go ahead, replace your current TTS voices in your IVR flows with Google voices and see the difference. Google TTS has lots of options. In the coming weeks, we will be opening up those options through the KooKoo APIs. So keep w...

A couple of months back, we had launched the Kookoo <recognize> tag. And as mentioned in the blog post, we support the Google speech engine and our very own Zena engine. The Kookoo speech engine as it currently stands is just a drop in the ocean when compared to the features provided by the Google speech engine. But, as they say, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. This post is about our first step. As of today, we are launching our first model, the Yes/No model, built in house, based on a proprietary AI algorithm . You can now design your Kookoo IVRs to say "Please say yes or no", instead of "Please press 1 for yes and 2 for no". In the internal tests our model's accuracy has been so good, we believe that this can become the standard interaction mechanism instead of DTMF. We also did a side by side comparison of our model with Google's speech API. Before presenting the results below, some disclaimers: 1. Our model is a ...

Just recently we launched the Kookoo speech API . This will allow your applications to hear what your customers are saying. We also showed you how to convert your chatbots to voicebots . So whats next? By now, many of you would have realized that we are going for a full stack approach. We started off with the telephony stack and then added a speech layer on top of it. Today, we are announcing the addition of an understanding layer, Kookoo Intent (beta). This is an invite only launch, so please send us an email if you are interested to try this out. To be fair, you can just use our telephony stack and the speech layer and then use some third party APIs for intent analysis. There are a lot of APIs for Intent from Google, Facebook etc. But if you just want to build your complete bot using Kookoo, then Kookoo Intent allows you to do that. More importantly, we will be concentrating on providing NLP services for Indian languages. We will be partnering with NLP API providers to pow...

Chat bots were big in 2017. Then the hype died down a little bit. We still have a lot of chat bots. But now the chat bots are more practical and solve real problems. Chat bots have their space and they solve a problem. But as we all know, voice is more natural. What if we can have a chat bot interface on the voice channel. Well, as I explained in my previous blog post , you always could build a voice bot on Kookoo . But now with the launch of Kookoo speech API , it has become much easier to build voice bots using Kookoo. In fact if you have already built a chat bot( Xploree , Verloop , FB messenger, Alexa etc), adding a voice channel to your bot is as simple as just signing up for Kookoo and enabling the service. A simple pipeline to convert your chat bot to voice bot Lets say you have chat bot that gives information about State Tourism . Its obviously a request response conversation model where the user types a request and the bot responds. So current flow might be(I have si...

Hello! Can you hear me? Well, yes. Kookoo can now hear you. Voice has suddenly become popular again and you can now find voice interfaces everywhere(Alexa, Google Home etc). Lucky for us, as we are the voice experts :) Note: They say a demo is worth a 1000 words(well, I said that :)), so here goes a demo. Just call the number and say something, you will get an SMS with the text of what you said 040-3095 2027 We can already build innovative IVR apps using Kookoo . But what has been lacking for a long time is to allow natural communication using speech in an IVR. The major stumbling block for that was automated speech recognition. But that problem is now a thing of the past. Thanks to Google, Amazon and other players including yours truly, we now have access to good speech engines which give pretty good accuracy. Flickr So today, we announce a new tag in Kookoo: <recognize> A new tag has been added to Kookoo after years. And what an addition it is :). <rec...

In technology, hype plays a big role. And in general the hype is created by media. And it has been my observation that tech media is not very savvy and just go with the buzzwords of the day. So its very amusing that now a days I am hearing a lot about voice user interfaces for enterprise apps. This trend has picked up because of new devices like Google Home and Alexa. The more prevalent they become, the more the hype machine starts talking about it. The funny part is, voice user interfaces for enterprises have been around since 1980s. They are just known with a different name and you just need a more humble device to interact. Voice user interfaces for enterprises have been known as IVRs(Interactive voice response systems) and all you need is a phone to interact with them. I agree that the old school IVRs were cumbersome and not very intelligent(I can say the same about current day chat bots). But with the advent of Twilio and our own KOOKOO ,very innovative IVRs have been c...

KOOKOO cloud call center has always had very good integration with Salesforce. We were one of the first cloud call center providers to have an open CTI integration. We have also updated the integration to be lightning compatible . To make the integration better, one the eve of Dreamforce 2017, we are launching Salesforce widgets for our IVR designer. So now, you can drag and drop Salesforce widgets and design your IVR flow.   Specifically, we have added two widgets: 1. Fetch lead: This will allow you to fetch lead details based on caller id. 2. Generate activity: This can be used at the end of a call to generate an activity. Properly designing an IVR is very important. A properly designed IVR can answer most of the caller questions and hence save agent time. With these widgets it is now much easier to query your Salesforce instance from the IVR and get the required details to the callers. These are now publicly available. Talk to us to see this in action. ...

For most businesses, call centers are the first touch point for a customer. So it is paramount that the call center experience has to be good. And most good call center softwares provide a lot of tools to improve the caller experience. But there is always scope to improve. With new tools and channels getting introduced into the business workflow, call center softwares have to catch up and start providing integrations. The most important communication suite that has become a part of almost every business is Slack. So it would be great if Slack was a part of the call center workflow too. Slack could be the perfect alerting channel for events happening in your call center You can configure alerts for a variety of things: Queue alerts in case some callers are waiting for a long time. Call alerts in case you are getting more calls than usual. IVR alerts if the callers are dropping off at the IVR itself.  Basically, you can setup alerts for any part of your call center fl...

Unless you have been living under a rock, you know that Amazon has launched its cloud call center offering, Amazon Connect. Since we have been in the cloud call center space for the last 8 years, here are a few of my thoughts on why Amazon Connect will most probably fail in its current avatar. 1. Support: Call center products thrive on support. Call center solutions are real time products. What happens when you get one way audio? What happens if your calls are not going through? What happens when your number is not reachable? What happens when your agents are not able to login? Sure hope you have a number to reach out to. Email support does not cut it. But this goes against the AWS principles as AWS support is mostly through email. 2. Positioning: The current positioning of Connect is confusing to say the least. Its setup is similar to AWS instance setup which is generally done by technical people. Technical people prefer Twilio for their call center. Its feature set is limited a...