TellMe Rolls Out Better Speech Recognition And An Almost-Sexy New Voice Called Zira

TellMe, which Microsoft bought two years ago, is rolling out an
upgrade to its call center automation software which should improve
its speech recognition rates. It is also adding Global Crossing as
partner for reselling its VoiP carrier service, along with AT&T and
Verizon. TellMe handles 2.5 billion calls a year for customers such as
American Airlines and ETrade. Even a one percent improvement in
automated call completion rates translates into millions of dollars a
year for large call centers.

TellMe will be deploying a new text-to-speech engine with an
almost-sexy female voice called Zira. She only sounds slightly
robotic. Another set of technologies can break up sentences into their
constituent parts so that if the software doesn't understand something
it can ask for only the piece of missing information instead of
repeating the entire question. or instance, if you say you want to fly
from New york to San Francisco on Wednesday, and it got everything but
the day, it would only ask you what day you want to fly instead of
making you repeat your entire itinerary.