Cloud Telephony Experiments

When HUL came to us with an idea to implement a phone app to connect migrant workers for free, we took it as a challenge to make it happen as it was for a good cause. And we are proud of the final system which came up. When we ran a sample set of voices through different recognizers, we found that our system outperformed even the Google speech recognizer. Our success rate at recognizing phone numbers in Hindi and English ( all 10 digits) was almost 2 times that of Google. ( note : We ran the samples through Google's speech cloud to get their recognition rate) Granted, ours was a specialized system and Google's was generic, but hey, we still feel proud :) Challenges in Lo Kar Lo Baat : Generally, accuracy of speech recognition depends on many factors like; 1) channel property, speech sampling rate, speech coding 2) deviation in pattern due to effect of dialects, speaking rate and speaking style 3) effect of background In Lo Kar Lo Baat we had faced many...

We have always wanted to be a company which owns the full stack. That is the reason we built our own PRI cards, we built our own telephony stack and the web stack. As of today, we are adding one more layer in our KooKoo stack, Speech . You can now view all our speech products at http://speech.ozonetel.com This sub domain has been in the making for the last two years. We have already deployed our speech products on the KooKoo platform for a couple of very successful projects. And now, we have made it available for general release. All KooKoo developers can start using these speech products in their cloud telephony applications. In case you want this to be enabled for your account, please reach out to sales@ozonetel.com  These speech tools will help you to reduce agent cost by using speech recognition driven IVR flows for automated intuitive interaction with customers. They allow you to improve support by identifying callers using speaker verification . You can also do q...

The launch of UPI can be considered as a watershed moment. This has opened up a whole new way of sending and receiving payments and will surely lead to a lot of innovation. The API is really well designed for a government effort. But guess it was expected given the great efforts put in by a lot of volunteers. So,hats off to them. Whenever innovative things happen, you know KooKoo is not far behind :) So, in this blog post, I will show you an easy way to collect payments using a missed call. 1. Register for a KooKoo missed call account. and specify an app URL. You will receive a missed call number. 2. When some one calls on your missed call number, KooKoo makes a http request to your URL with the caller details. 3. Build UPI payment request URL based on specification provided by NCPI . So lets say your VPA is ozonetel@somebank and you need to request Rs.2, your request will be something like, upi://pay?pa=ozonetel@somebank&am=2 . 4. Send this link in an SMS back to the cal...

When Google announced the Google Speech API  we knew that it was a perfect fit with KooKoo. After all, developers had already built cool stuff on KooKoo like the Apple Siri clone using the unofficial API. So within a week of Google announcing the beta API for speech, our engineers have now cooked it into the core KooKoo platform. And we are now announcing a limited release of Google speech on KooKoo. All KooKoo developers can now start using speech recognition in their cloud telephony apps. Call and leave a review and get the text of the review immediately.  Call to raise a complaint and get the complaint in text .  Say the order number over the phone and get order details.  The possibilities are endless. Since now this is part of KooKoo , all our Cloudagent customers can also make use of this to understand their call center operations as well. Google speech itself is in beta, so it goes without saying that our limited release is also in beta...

Storyweaver  is an awesome site. Its one of the favorite sites for my kids. You get a lot of great stories. But more importantly you get stories licensed under creative commons ( CC-BY-4.0). This provides for a lot of flexibility for developers like me. So using these stories, we had built a story bot on Facebook messenger. Kids can chat with the bot and get stories. Now that this was working well, I thought of adding some fun into the mixture. What if the kids can star in their own story. After all, they are reading the story on the mobile. So courtesy of some image processing magic ( OpenCV) and stories from Storyweaver you can now star in your own story. Right now there is only one story. The technical details of how this was done will be shared in another blog. So go ahead and star in your own story at KooKooStoryBot . (Like the page if you like it :)) An example story with Leonardo as the star is below :) Update: Improved the image processing to fit the face ...

It seems like every other day now we get a blog post about how one technology/channel is dead and how this new thing is now the best thing since sliced bread. First they said the phone call is dead. Not . Then they said email is dead. Or support over email is dead. etc etc. Not Though these may be ok to get page views, the reality of the matter is quite different. Phone calls and Email usage has not gone down ( for businesses, its a different story for B2C). In fact it has increased. And all the blog posts take some example of a bad implementation and highlight what is wrong with the old technology or channel. Problem is even in the new channels, in app support etc there are some very bad examples. But that does not mean that the problem is with the channels. The problem is with the implementations. Flickr For example, very few IVR systems use the context of the caller and provide help. Very few use speech recognition technologies which have improved by leaps and...

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 ...