Ifbyphone Blog

While there are many telephone technology conferences each year, two stand out. VON and eComm. VON is where the business professionals in the voice and telephony industries go to make deals. eComm is where the technologists go to innovate.

Prior to this year Etel (the predecessors to eComm) was an O’Reilly sponsored conference designed to provide a forum for people working in the emerging telephony technologies to get together, learn and network. When O’Reilly decided to drop the Etel conference a ground swell of discussion in the telco world lead Lee S Dryburgh to put his day job on hold and facilitate eComm as a replacement. As stated on the eComm site:

“eComm is the venue for those interested in the radical transformation of the trillion dollar telecommunications industry. It has already started down the path that the homebrew computer took three decades ago. Just as democratized computation gave birth to the computer industry, eComm is tracking, highlighting and promoting the people and technologies driving this new wave of democratization.

eComm brings out the visionaries, emergent technologies, real-world startups, cutting-edge academic projects, views from the incumbent telecom players; garage based hacks and stirs required policy debates to create the ultimate three-day conversation.

The story of the decentralization of communications innovation has past the second chapter which was VoIP. It is now regarded as a building block only. As a standalone service it is both uninspiring and unlikely to be highly profitable.”

The Ifbyphone phone mashup API is an ideal vehicle for developers looking to build creative web to phone applications. At my eComm 2008 talk I will describe the Ifbyphone architecture used to drive down the costs of sophisticated IVR applications while making them accessible to any web developer or small business.

Information about eComm 2008

Here’s a story from a local institution that had a budget problem. One department found that they always overspent their budget but no one could ever find out why. Eventually a new person joined the staff and decided to solve the mystery, and discovered that the money was leaking out of the department because a completely different department was using it to pay for their office supplies. And how was that possible? It seems that the institution assigned budget numbers in numerical order. A simple clerical error, getting one digit in the account number wrong, allowed one department to drain money — for years — from the budget of a different department.

Now imagine the same thing happening at your company before you introduce automated account information. Someone speaks to their customer service representative (or to you) and you have a conversation. If they give you the wrong account number, it’ll be clear fairly rapidly what the problem is. And if someone calls and tries to get information about a competitor’s account, you’ll figure that one out pretty quickly as well.

After you introduce automation, what prevents a caller from calling in and trying account numbers in sequence until they hit one that works? What if the caller is attempting fraud, or is attempting to access competitive information (about you or your customers)? And what if they make an honest mistake?

As a best practice, whether you have automation or not, the account numbers you assign should not be simply sequential. The most secure method is to assign a random number to each account. If that’s too complex, you might consider adding a single random number to the end (or the beginning, or the middle) of sequential account numbers. Or you can use one or more random digits and add one or two additional “checksum” digits, which is the method used by credit card companies to prevent people from guessing or confusing credit card numbers.

Is this a big change? Yes, it is. Is it necessary? Good question. Unless my company had a history of making accounting errors based on incorrect customer numbers, I wouldn’t bother switching old numbers for new ones, but I would start assigning new numbers with a little more care. If my company does experience problems — fraud, errors, and the like — than of course it pays to make corrections. And if my company safeguards important information for customers, such as medical records, I would be very cautious. I can’t speak to the legal requirements, but if an inexpensive change (and this change might be very expensive in some cases) can help protect against privacy violations, that’s what I would choose.

Many new telephone services, such as Click to Call, Virtual Call Centers, Hosted IVR and Voice Broadcast, rely on voice over IP (VOIP) telephone connections to deliver services at the lowest possible cost. While some of these services sound great, others deliver voice quality no better than the walkie talkies your child recently received for Christmas. This blog entry will attempt to present, for a non technical audience, the basics behind VOIP communications that determine the quality of a phone call. Specifically this blog will address VOIP traffic transmitted over the public Internet.

Your voice starts out as an analog wave or vibration. Remember the telephone you built as a child with two cans and a string. The bottom of the first can vibrates, this vibrates the string, which then vibrates the bottom of the second can. In a traditional telephone these same vibrations are used to modulate an electrical signal transmitted over a wire which replaces the string.In VOIP communications your voice is converted from an analog wave into a series of data packets. These data packets, which share the Internet with email, web page transmissions and file transfers, are then transmitted from one computer to another where at the destination the data packets are converted back into a sound wave you can hear.

The process of digitizing sound is well understand and as in the case of DVDs can be very high quality. In fact many DVDs are better quality than traditional analog recordings.Unfortunately, unlike high quality DVDs, which have the capacity to transport a large amount of data, the Internet has limited bandwidth. Therefore when we digitize voice for transmission over the Internet we compress the data significantly more than the music on a typical DVD. This compression reduces the quality of the sound.

There are many standards for the compression of voice. However, in a typical engineering trade off; the more we compress the voice transmission, the more conversations we can transmit over the same Internet connection. The other side of this trade off is that the more we compress the voice the worse it sounds.

The vast majority of telephone calls today, even the calls made on your traditional home phone, are digitized. The traditional telephone companies use a compression standard called PCM or G.711. In fact VOIP telephone services that use G.711, such as Ifbyphone, sound just as good as traditional telephone calls.

Another common compression standard is G.729. Telephone calls compressed with G.729 are compressed on average four times more than G.711 or traditional telephone calls. This additional compression results in lower overall call quality.The telephone industry has a standard measurement of telephone call voice quality called the Mean Opinion Score or MOS. The generally accepted typical MOS (just Google MOS for more examples) for a number of compression standards follow:

Traditional PSTN phone calls: MOS is close to 4.5

G.711: 4.4 or better

G.729 about 4

G.723 about 3.5

G.726 between 3.5 and 4.3

Unfortunately this is not the whole picture. The quality of the connection of to the Internet used by your VOIP service provider also affects the quality of your telephone call. And finally some VOIP vendors use a Voice Activity Detection algorithm to reduce the bandwidth they need for your calls. VAD attempts to listen for silence between the callers in a telephone conversation and stop transmitting packages when no one is talking. If the VAD algorithm is inappropriately tuned the ends of your words will be clipped and overall voice quality will decline.

At Ifbyphone we are committed to the delivery of high quality voice services designed for business customers. We exclusively use G.711 for our business services. Since many of our services rely on automated voice recognition we need to set very high voice standards for the recognition to function properly.

Please feel free to post comments to this blog entry about your VOIP experiences and information you may have about the codex or compression standard used by your VOIP vendor.

A recent cover article in Speech Technology Magazine discusses small business and the adoption of speech technology. Of course, what they mean by “small” is one thousand employees or less; these businesses are just now finding that the purchase of special-purpose speech technology solutions and equipment can be cost effective.

I don’t know the size of a typical Ifbyphone customer; but Ifbyphone’s technology drives the cost of speech recognition down to the point that a single-person company can find it useful, affordable, and indispensable.

Let’s travel back in time for a moment, way, way back—to the year 2005. The Internet was beginning to recover from the bubble burst a few years before and IVR technology with automated speech recognition, while commonly used by the customer service departments of large corporations, was still something people were skeptical about. Many consumers preferred human interaction when dealing with billing departments or service specialists. Thinking along these lines, TMC President and blogger Rich Tehrani asked a fundamental question: Does Speech Technology Work? While still in its early adolescence, Tehrani believed that speech technology did, in fact, serve customers well and was the wave of the future. He voiced a level of agreement with an anti-speech technology article linked in his blog, but came to the conclusion that to ignore VoIP and speech technologies was akin to shunning the ATM when it first appeared.

Two years on, Tehrani’s pronouncements have proven to be more than true. Speech technologies not only save businesses money but expedite telephone processes. Less time waiting for an available operator means more time to go about your day—who can complain about that? Businesses have become smarter about designing their VUI and VoIP systems, anticipating areas where it’s wise to have a customer speak directly to a human, and considerate enough to know that some people will always want to speak to with a real, live customer representative. But make no mistake, speech technology works, and it’s changing the way people do business.

Speech is a tricky thing. It can be hard enough to get a co-worker sitting at the desk next to you understand what you’re saying, let alone trying to make a computerized voice machine send you to the right message over the telephone. With so many companies going the way of computerized Virtual Receptionists and using VUIs (voice user interfaces) to conduct day-to-day business, it’s increasingly more important to have a system that can read different accents and variances in speech. But you don’t want to go overboard, either; it wouldn’t be useful to have every cough or neck twitching grunt take you to the CEO’s voice mailbox, would it?

This article in Speech Technologies magazine discusses some of the ways to wisely implement a VUI, as well as outlining what to stay away from. Ifbyphone offers several applications that utilize VUIs. For more information, visit our Home page.

When I go to Starbucks for a cup of tea, I’m always asked what size tea I want. At first I didn’t want to spend time remembering Startbucks’ silly jargon for the different sizes, and I tried to tell them “small” or “medium”; but then I found they would repeat “tall” and “grande” back at me and expect me to parrot the words back at them. I realize that the people behind the counter are only doing their job, but frankly I always try to get tea elsewhere rather than put up with this rather annoying Starbucks marketing trick.

What about your company? Do you expect your customers to learn how to speak to you, or are you responsible for listening to them? Almost every company develops an internal jargon, but that jargon can cause real trouble if you start using it to talk to customers.

Let me give you an example of a poorly-designed telephone application. A few years back I called a local hospital to check up on a bill. I got their automated billing system, and that’s where the fun began. “Please enter your group number. The group number is the two digits to the right of the dash in your account number.” This announcement was so wrong in so many ways that I can’t begin to recite them all, but here’s the summary:

• Trying to teach me their internal jargon (”group number”) was a huge mistake;
• They could have just asked for the entire account number and sorted out what they needed without getting me involved;
• I was so bemused and flustered by the directions that I entered the digits to the left of the dash, and that was that for the phone call.

The basic lesson is quite simple. For a phone application to work successfully, you can’t confuse your customers and they shouldn’t have to learn new tricks. Your announcements have to use words that your customers expect to hear, and the choices that you offer should make sense to the customers.

How do you know what they expect to hear? Listen to what they ask and echo it back to them. If they ask for “a medium cup of tea,” don’t offer them a “grande,” offer them a medium cup of tea. They’ll be happier and less confused; and a happy, less-confused customer will use your telephone application instead of demanding to speak to a live operator.