Feature: For Carjackings, Press 7 - Telematics goes the Extra Mile

Automated telephone systems can be frustrating enough under ordinary circumstances. But if your car gets stolen, the system that calls to notify you had better not add to the stress, since you bought it for reassurance and security. So is the thinking at San Francisco-based Televoke, whose systems track and control vehicles and other valuable assets.

Televoke was founded by Rick Bentley, who wanted a way to track important things after his motorcycle was stolen years ago, and realised that miniaturization, GPS tracking, and the cellular phone network now makes it possible.

Televoke now connects people to things by providing an automated web and telephony service platform that enables businesses to develop and deliver location-based safety, security and productivity applications for their customers. Individuals and enterprises can track and control assets, and be proactively notified through any internet-connected device or telephone when a valuable asset or loved one is at risk.

While Televoke's system does not use speech recognition or the virtual assistant metaphor, it does use similar principles to create a natural friendly voice that avoids the illogical and redundant instructions other IVR (interactive voice response) systems suffer from.

Voice talent is important. Televoke's voice belongs to Stacy Kray. Even though Kray had no voice-over experience two years and thousands of recordings ago, she had the reassuring voice Bentley was looking for and her background as a singer gave her the control needed for this demanding and sometimes repetitive assignment.

But voice talent isn't the only key to success. Companies put a lot of effort into finding the right voice and making clean recordings, but pay very little attention to scriptwriting. Programmers make things easy to program at the expense of making things easy for the users. It's a challenge to see how few individual recordings you can get away with. But that's not always the best way.

An efficient programmer, for example, will specify just one set of recordings for numbers no matter how many contexts the program needs. This makes the system robotic, and also difficult to understand because of how the recordings are spliced together to make sentences.

Instead, we have created one set of recordings for times and another one for phone numbers. The intonation makes them fit into the sentences where they will be used. They're written how people say them aloud, not the way they appear in writing. "Eight fifteen Tuesday morning" is preferred to "eight fifteen a.m. on August thirteenth".

Attention to the big picture as well as the details helps too. I am supporting Televoke's commitment to making things as simple for callers as possible. We added a few steps for the vehicle installers so that the web interface will no longer show customers options for features they don't have. Sometimes, I'd encounter resistance if I suggested adding a step like that, but Televoke suggested this on their own.

Associated Link: Adducive

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