If you have an unusual name because it's rare, ethnic or your parents got creative with its spelling, you're probably used to people butchering it. Take for instance my last name, Allard. People love to pronounce it A-lard. Excuse me, did you just call me fat? Or for example, my co-worker, Tamaré, she commonly hears Tam-air. Forget the accent and invent a new airline while you’re at it. Funny or insulting, names are how we address one another and many people take their pronunciation personally.
Perhaps mispronunciation is useful when you want to screen out telemarketers, but for those of us who want our calls to reach us, especially in the office, we want the best voice dialing, directory assistance and auto attendant possible. To that end, it helps to know the difference between Allard and A-lard.
Having one's name mispronounced is a common malady, more common than many people realize. It's hard to pronounce names, and we are talking about people here, imagine how the computerized auto attendant struggles.
Names are hard to pronounce because of several factors. Foremost, the sheer quantity of them and the preponderance of rare names causes some trouble. The second factor is that names are derived from dozens of languages. The third, and perhaps the most important factor, are the many variations for some names. One person's incorrect rendition may be another person's preferred pronunciation. Just maybe there is a Tamaré and a Tam-air, and on the same directory nonetheless.
Easy to see that some difficult technology is needed in your chosen auto attendant solution. Most auto attendant systems rely on a large dictionary, while many also contain rules for "out of vocabulary” words and names. Rule-based systems embody basic knowledge of how words and names are pronounced. However, the rules can become quite complex, with context sensitivity determined by a rough ethnographic classification for the name. Therefore, it is fair to say rule systems vary in their ability to predict pronunciations.
Parlance might just be the auto attendant solution for you and your organization. Every Parlance employee, from company executives to service engineers, knows it’s a necessary responsibility to CONNECT THE CALLER. This company-wide philosophy, coupled with Parlance’s robust Managed Services, have made all the difference for their many customers.
Parlance’s Marketing Director, Mark Bedard, openly discussed, “In the early days of Parlance it was left up to the customer to manage pronunciations and the directory content and all these different tools, but then we began to notice performance degradation. Therefore we used this as a learning experience and packaged all the tools in a single offer. Every nameConnector system we sell now comes fully packaged with a managed service approach.”
Speech solutions require significant amounts of tuning along the way to be sure they perform at an optimal level. As Parlance’s Marketing Director, Mark Bedard, stated, “A big strength of Parlance has always been that, as a small company, we are very nimble in meeting our customer’s needs. Many of the innovations, applications, and processes we have in place came about from us trying to help a customer address an issue they are having with their telephony environment.”
Jaclyn Allard is a TMCnet copy editor. She most recently worked on the production team at Juran Institute, a quality consulting firm producing its own training and marketing materials. Previously, she interned at Curbstone Press, a nonprofit publishing press in Willimantic, CT, and fulfilled the role of Editor-in-Chief for the literature and arts journal published by the University of Connecticut. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Jaclyn Allard