To shed a little light on the expanded relationship between Avaya (News - Alert) and Loquendo, we spoke to Michael Perry, director of product management, Avaya Contact Center Solutions and Paolo Coppo, Loquendo’s vice president of marketing & business development.

 

Avaya Inc. offers business communications applications, systems and services providing unified communications, contact centers, and related services directly and through its channel partners for businesses and organizations around the world.

 

 

Can you tell us about the expanded relationship between Avaya and Loquendo?

MP: Loquendo has been a participant in the Avaya DevConnect (News - Alert) program for a long time, and as a DevConnect Gold member, the Loquendo MRCP Server is certified to work with Avaya Voice Portal, the company's flagship speech-enabled self-service solution.

The recent extension of the relationship now enables Avaya to resell Loquendo (News - Alert) speech technology licenses as a speech automation option for Avaya Voice Portal and a broad range of advanced contact center solutions.

Loquendo speech technologies can also be integrated with other Avaya contact center solutions, such as Intelligent Customer Routing, which unifies the customer care delivery across self and assisted services, and Proactive Outreach, which is a multi-channel outbound self-service solution.

 

 

PC: Loquendo MRCP Server is a server-based solution for large-scale telephony deployments with speech, such as contact centers. The server lets system integrators exploit the full range of Loquendo speech technologies because of its standards-based, client-server architecture.

The server also integrates Loquendo TTS, a natural and fluent synthetic speech solution offered in 27 languages, as well as Loquendo ASR, an accurate and noise-robust speech recognition solution. It also encompasses Loquendo Speaker Verification.

Loquendo MRCP Server is integrated via MRCP (Media Resource Control Protocol), both v1 and v2, and offers complete support for all speech IETF and W3C (News - Alert) standards. Our clean and optimized software design allows Loquendo speech technologies to be easily ported to a very large number of platforms and speech solutions, facilitating adoption.

 

Also, the server has a modular architecture, making it independent from ASR/TTS engines and language/voice packages, which provide both flexibility and scalability for software upgrades and installations of new languages and voices.

What were the key reasons for Avaya selecting Loquendo speech technologies for its self-service solutions?

MP: Loquendo speech is a competitive product and a real enrichment to our speech portfolio. The quality of Loquendo TTS and ASR is comparable or superior to competitors, coming at a very competitive price and backed up with skilled and highly competent technical support.

Loquendo also offers a wide choice of languages and voices, while integration of Loquendo technologies is very straightforward – via standard interfaces and protocols – also, Loquendo products are Avaya certified.

With this, we can continue to help businesses to enhance the caller experience, resolving queries more quickly and effectively while improving our customers’ bottom line.

 

How will Avaya clients benefit?

 

MP: Avaya customers will have more choice for extending their existing services by integrating the innovative, cost-effective speech technologies which Loquendo provides.

 

Avaya and Avaya Business Partners can now also address customers who demand high quality TTS and ASR - in the past, customers perceived price as outweighing expected value.

 

In addition, Loquendo provides broad language coverage for international and multi-nation accounts – offering customers interoperable and easy-to-integrate solutions for creating next generation customer care.

 

Any early adopters?

PC: The joint solution from Avaya and Loquendo technologies has been adopted by customers worldwide for customer help desks, self-service banking applications, railway timetable services and for information and ticketing at football events.

 

VIVA, one of Bolivia's mobile service providers, is one company that has implemented an Avaya Voice Portal and Loquendo TTS solution in its contact center. By routing customer information requests to Avaya Voice Portal, VIVA helps its live agents be more efficient: specific information is automatically provided to customers by means of Loquendo TTS, freeing up agents to deal with more complex inquiries and enhancing the quality of service which customers receive.

 

Also, the information provided via TTS prompts is easy to modify online - for special advertising campaigns, for example. And since no re-recording is required, it takes just a few minutes and incurs no extra cost.