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Understanding the issues that make voice telephony a challenging task should help form realistic expectations about implementing a voice telephony solution with Active Call Center.
We have done our best to make Active Call Center the best product possible. Despite our efforts, the performance of this product is still heavily dependent on factors out of our control. The discussion below will help you understand why our license agreement includes the phrase "any use of this software is at your own risk." Any customer interested in implementing enterprise class telephony solutions should also read the chapter on Enterprise Class Telephony.
Modem and Telephony Card Issues
The problem: Audio quality is important for creating clear, understandable content for the telephone. Unfortunately, most voice modems have poor audio quality and no volume adjustments. To make matters worse, regular telephone lines are restricted to low audio sampling rates which degrades audio even further.
The fixes: Use a high quality brand name voice modem - stay away from the extremely low priced brands. Use the Lucent engine for text-to-speech generation if you have it, since it has a volume adjustment that can be applied before generated speech is delivered to the modem. Where possible, record your own audio prompts and amplify them as necessary. Use Active Call Center's audio tools for boosting recorded audio volume at run-time. A Brooktrout telephony card will offer maximum performance.
The problem: Sound quality is very important for doing speech recognition, but most voice modems today have very poor sound quality for voice telephony applications.
The fixes: Again, stick with high quality brand name modems. Use touch tone prompts whenever possible, as these have high recognition accuracy. Limit speech recognition options to a few distinct sounding selections. A Brooktrout telephony card will offer maximum performance.
The problem: If the modem doesn't know when the caller has left, the modem may stay on the call forever and all subsequent callers would get a busy signal. Occasionally, another interesting problem surfaces: the telephone company's message that plays after spending too long on a dead line may be recognized as valid responses by Active Call Center.
The fixes: Active Call Center automatically disconnects callers after a long enough period of inactivity. Active Call Center will also disconnect a caller when a Call Tree reaches a terminal Node. Brooktrout telephony cards offer excellent hangup detection and resolve this issue nicely.
The problem: Modems and modem drivers can have "bugs", just like any other software. In other cases, manufacturers may state their product is TAPI compatible even if it is not 100% TAPI compatible. Active Call Center is more likely to reveal these flaws than other communication programs because of the variety of stresses it places on a telephony device. A particular area of concern is the device's audio drivers, which are given a thorough workout by Active Call Center.
The fixes: Make sure you have the most recent of drivers from your telephony device manufacturer. Be prepared to switch modems or telephony cards if your system delivers inconsistent or erratic performance with a particular modem or telephony card.
Speech Recognition Issues
The problem: Speech recognition technology is still in its early stages - it's far from perfect. Those users that own other voice response or dictation software know that even after extensive training a speech engine still cannot recognize some of what is said. Those users not experienced with other voice response software should think about how often they hear something on the telephone or over a public address system that they do not understand perfectly. If occasionally you have a trouble understanding what is said, you can bet that a computer will have trouble much more often than you.
The problem: The ease with which a human can understand voice that comes out of a speaker depends on the quality of the speaker, the quality of the connection, the quality of the microphone, etc. Over the telephone, virtually all of these factors are uncontrollable and so the limitations of speech recognition technology are magnified over the telephone. Poor sound quality, background noise, bad connections, and a variety of different users with varying accents make it very challenging for a computer to accurately understand words spoken over the phone.
The fixes: Active Call Center's solution to speech recognition issues is to limit the number of acceptable responses at each Node. When dealing with spelled words, Active Call Center tries to increase accuracy by using phonetic alphabets (similar to what the police use to avoid mixing up license plate spellings).
If you own an advanced speech recognition engine that complies with Microsoft's SAPI 4.0, you may be able to use it with Active Call Center - check under Tools... Digital Voice Selection from the Active Call Center menu bar to see if it is an available option. This may also help increase recognition accuracy and reduce caller frustration.
Many users may find that even with a limited number of responses and a better speech recognition engine that the voice recognition accuracy is still not acceptable. In any case, take care to design Call Trees that give the caller the option to navigate the Tree without voice recognition.
Software Development Issues
The problem: In order to provide a product to the public in a reasonable amount of time, software developers will integrate third party components that provide specific functionality. Active Call Center Company subscribes to this philosophy of component-based software development. Unfortunately, virtually all of the components we use in developing Active Call Center have no guarantee that they will work. Obviously, if a component fails to perform, then Active Call Center may fail to perform as well. We specifically do not guarantee our software to be 100% bug-free; in fact, we know that our software has some bugs - we just try to control the bugs that we can control as best as possible.
The problem: To take advantage of efficiencies provided by modern operating systems, we use pre-existing hardware and software device drivers. Those users that install hardware and software on a regular basis know that quite often a hardware driver will not work with the hardware it was designed for, or a software driver will fail with some particular hardware, etc. Active Call Center cannot escape these types of problems - it relies on a coordinated integration between the caller's actions, the modem hardware and drivers, the software drivers, the speech engines, and itself to achieve the Call Tree flow that you see. If any link in this chain breaks, the whole chain may fall apart and the Call Tree may not work.
Conclusion
By now it should be evident that there are a lot of things that can go wrong when implementing voice telephony solutions. The good news? Many users report that once they have a hardware configuration in place that works well consistently with Active Call Center, that configuration continues to work well with little further maintenance.
Some of our most successful users have reported that their Active Call Center call monitors have been answering phone calls for months at a time, without fail! More common reports indicate that on a properly configured system, Active Call Center will process phone calls steadily for days or weeks at a time without crashing. The performance you experience may vary significantly from what is described here.