Today with Steve and Tom, we discuss conversational voice design. The key requirement for a successful voicebot. No matter what the platform from Genesys to Avaya, wherever there is the facility to build voicebots, the conversational design is so important. We talk about why voicebots are not being used as effectively as they should be, even now, and how to get some starting point and expertise to get you off the ground.
A voicebot should sound like a human agent, so how is that achieved?
Our latest series of podcasts, concentrates on voice and how that is going to impact the next few years with tips along the way. Find out more about voicebots here and if you have any subjects that you would like us to discuss then email info@disruptionworks.co.uk with the subject Podcast and we will see what we can do ;-)
Today with Steve and Tom, we discuss conversational voice design. The key requirement for a successful voicebot. No matter what the platform from Genesys to Avaya, wherever there is the facility to build voicebots, the conversational design is so important. We talk about why voicebots are not being used as effectively as they should be, even now, and how to get some starting point and expertise to get you off the ground.
A voicebot should sound like a human agent, so how is that achieved?
Our latest series of podcasts, concentrates on voice and how that is going to impact the next few years with tips along the way. Find out more about voicebots here and if you have any subjects that you would like us to discuss then email info@disruptionworks.co.uk with the subject Podcast and we will see what we can do ;-)
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Steve Tomkinson
Hello everybody and welcome to another exciting edition of disruption works chitchat. I've got Tom Houwing with me today.
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Steve Tomkinson
Our voice consultant. Good morning, Tom. How are you? You're alright.
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tom (gast)
Good morning. I'm fine. How are you?
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah, not too bad. Not too bad. I'm glad it's sunny outside for a change and it is over here anyway. I mean, what's it like in The Hague?
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tom (gast)
It's a little bit foggy, but the sun is trying to get through the clouds but.
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tom (gast)
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Ohk. OK, well, you might have some sun coming over from our direction, so that's good news.
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tom (gast)
I mean it's it's almost more English whether here than with you in English.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah, thanks for that. Yeah. I'm always very jealous of you to go. Yeah. I've just been down to the beach and, you know, I took the dog for a walk. And what time?
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tom (gast)
Yeah. Yeah, but.
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tom (gast)
So with the weather could be better actually, but OK.
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tom (gast)
And we.
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Steve Tomkinson
Ah, OK, alright. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it because we're in Plymouth and I'm at the nice thing about it. Plymouth is that we are by the same. But you have a beach and a beach. The beaches aren't walking distance from Plymouth which is a real shame, you know. That's that's one thing we're missing.
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tom (gast)
Yeah. When I when I woke up my door, I like one minute I am on the beach actually.
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Steve Tomkinson
Uh, I hate you. I hate you already.
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Steve Tomkinson
Well, like thanks. Thanks for doing this. Uh, join us on the podcast day. I I think we're going to try and do this as as an ongoing thing. So anybody is listening we we'll we'll be doing a series of these podcasts with Tom. But what we wanted you to try and talk about today was.
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Steve Tomkinson
Uh. The fact that there's a lot of big systems out there. Uh like, UM, uh, genesis, nice aviral the rest of them that have voicebots built in, but there's one, not a great take up of that technology internally on those big platforms and and two, it's like well, why, why, why why is that and what are the challenges and?
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Steve Tomkinson
At what's the approach that should be taken with these things? Uh, cause.
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Steve Tomkinson
There's a there's a huge gap in the fact that we need voicebots in the market. The technology has moved on, or else generally we have our own platform that uses all the cloud services and the power of that, the cloud services that are around, you know, like Google for.
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Steve Tomkinson
Uh and Lu and stuff like that. So it's it. How can you engage with your big platform and that's kind of what I'm trying to talk about?
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
Yeah, you're right. I mean, first of all, we need to respect one very important issue here. I mean, you're talking about those big systems and Europe actually, right? But those big systems were actually created as telephony platforms and they were created already for some time ago on the go. And of course, there is an ongoing development on those platforms and.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
No.
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tom (gast)
Uh, the industry recognizes the added value of voice, so they would be working on an integration trying to build in something that could be a voice bot functionality. But in the basic those platforms were made not especially because they were not voiced, focused and now you see now you see the problem here a little bit. I mean there are players out there who have been creating software.
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tom (gast)
And that is exclusively dedicated to voice and everything that has to do with that and the other ones are trying to integrate it. And that's the difference.
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tom (gast)
Yes.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah, and having the interesting bit is, is that they know they need it because they've been including it. So it's a, you know, Genesis aren't gonna go and buy a voice, but provider or try and integrate it into their stuff. If they don't think it's a thing, you know, they know that it's a requirement and this is only gonna get more important as they go. But like you said, they're trying to shoehorn this in trying to force it into their system.
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Steve Tomkinson
Wasn't like you said originally. Inspired by that and and it wasn't thought through to have that stuff in there. So it is a challenge.
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tom (gast)
Yes. Then you're totally right. And I mean, let's also face it, I mean.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
And a working with speech technology and speech recognition and later on in the context of a voice bot, you really need specialized technicians that are that know the the way of how to program software that really works well with the cloud, for instance, how we work with speech to text and how we analyze what we get back from the cloud. So this is a skill set that is specialized on voice.
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Steve Tomkinson
No.
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tom (gast)
Which those great big providers like Genesis, they do not have voice specialists in that that context.
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tom (gast)
Correct.
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Steve Tomkinson
No, and. And that's and that's kind of part of this uh podcast is the fact that this is the challenge. So you know the challenge we see at the moment is that there's two sides, one that the platforms aren't really providing support about the technique of providing a conversational flow or any design within their own voice bot platforms, but also the the client, the end user of the platform.
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Steve Tomkinson
They also, you know, inside their businesses, they're not gonna have the expertise as well. So what do you do? How do you get started? And I think that's the that's then the challenge they've go why? We've spent a fortune on this big system we spent. We spent a lot of money with keep coming back to this. They're gonna hate us for it, but.
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tom (gast)
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
You know they have this system. Well, it should we switch to a via. So a via, right? There's been a fortune on it and the game, but how do we use the voice bot elements of this? You know, how do we do that? Because we know we need it. We've got a contact center that's overrun. We can't. The queues are getting longer and longer. How do we remove those queues? And of course Voicebots is the solution for that. Everybody understands that but.
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Steve Tomkinson
How do they start?
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah, yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
No.
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tom (gast)
Yeah. You're. So you're so right. You're so right. I mean, the other day, I was talking to one of my my business customers who literally told me I I, I, I, I showed them the solutions but possible with voice bot. And they really show you. They literally told me you have. But we invested so much in it on the Genesis platform. So we don't. We are not going to invest anything more. And now they're stuck because they do not. They are not in a position to quickly create something that is working with speech technology because.
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Steve Tomkinson
No.
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tom (gast)
Those platforms do not provide a toolbox where you can easily build a voice bot, and secondly, an even more important, they don't have the skill sets that is required to create a conversational style. I mean, the conversational style in fact has nothing to do with the technique. It has to do with the way of thinking.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yes, that's right. And that I suppose that's the that's the point now is that.
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Steve Tomkinson
We there's been a this has been around for a long time as as you know a time because you've been doing this for decades.
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Steve Tomkinson
I'd hate to say sorry. Sorry you have.
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tom (gast)
Good.
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Steve Tomkinson
I'm, but you know. So it's been around for a long time. But of course the technology now is caught up at to make this it a proven system. Now it works. It's not a, it's not something that's experimental anymore. It's actually it works and it's and it's a thing, but there's still isn't enough of it used in the marketplace to help customers, but also to help the teams that are help also helping customers and something has to break. And I think the.
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Steve Tomkinson
Problem we now have is that there's a whole space where people who've got these big systems need to consider we have to invest.
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Steve Tomkinson
Time and effort into the design process of this we have to we have to start looking at.
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Steve Tomkinson
How we design AA voice bot rather than just even just using the tools if they've got even the skills to do that to go OK, we've made a voice bot, but it was really bad and you just go. Well, of course it was because you didn't think it through you. You never had that experience. You don't have the conversational flow design. You don't have. We make bots that sound like an agent, but that's a skill, you know. And I think that's the point. The bits that are missing in this equation.
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tom (gast)
Yes, I think you're right. We should not forget some, some, some things here. We're coming from a.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah, yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
From a former period of voice recognition development where it, let's say, let's go back ten years, then we we there was no cloud solution and I mean let's face it, Google gets millions billions of inputs every day. They are in the position to tune immense correctly compared to proprietary systems where people handle their own language models and try to make it work as possible. So in the old days.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
The accuracy was also not that high, so we were not always sure if we really got what the caller said. And we also work with what we call one word recognition so that the system was tuned on only single words.
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tom (gast)
And some.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
You might as well, yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
No.
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tom (gast)
Are today say today now if you rent a car tomorrow, press one goes faster. I mean this. Yeah. This type of one word recognition kind of design is not providing any added value and furthermore it does not connect with what we call language instinct. I mean people use their language in communication but we create with these old school designs we create something that has absolutely nothing to do with the dialogue it has to do with trying to get.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
Somebody to match your word. And now today we are in a totally different situation. I mean everything is GDPR compliant. Today Google is compliant, everything is safe and we have a unbelievable accuracy in speech recognition. So when we send something spoken to the cloud speech to text.
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tom (gast)
Transcription is working so well today that we are really in the situation to work in a total different dimension compared to what we had to do for that.
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tom (gast)
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
And then that that gives us then. So the natural language understanding is there, uh, and then you've gotta do the processing of that language. So you get your text stream and it's then to say, well, OK, we now know exactly what they're saying. We can design the flow around what they're saying and respond accordingly in a very natural fashion. So the flow of conversation is, like me and you talking, and I'm going, I need to rent a car tomorrow or I need to hire A car tomorrow.
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tom (gast)
No.
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Steve Tomkinson
Tomorrow I could do with a car and you know all those different ways of of, of asking the same question doesn't really matter. We're we're still matching it up and we go, that's fine. No problem. So OK, you need something for tomorrow. We've got these available. What do you want? And that negotiation is so natural that look, we never fool and we've always say this. We never fool anybody that this is not an automated service. It's not a voice bot that's calling them or.
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Steve Tomkinson
Or is is taking the call but they forget.
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Steve Tomkinson
So that's the point. If we can make them forget that it's a, it's a voice bot and they just get it done. Whatever they're trying to do, rent a car or what, or change their account details or whatever it is.
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Steve Tomkinson
That's where we've won, but that takes the skills of a conversational design, not somebody that's just going. Ohh, I'd got this Avaya platform and I've got I'm doing some stuff.
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Steve Tomkinson
No.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
Yeah, you're you're totally right. And OK, my in my experience, the emphasis was always the technique and the software design, never the design of the flow. That is always that came always 2nd place. Now we finally start to understand that if you wanna make a voice that's very successful, the voice bot has to be very conversational. And I mean to make a flow design very conversational, you need to have.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
Expertise in how language works, how how you, how you react on somebody's verbalized message and how you can direct that message into an answer that would be maybe guiding the caller in a place where you want to have him or her and where he, he or she says what you want. Finally wanna hear. But to get there you need to be specialized in a human dialogue.
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Steve Tomkinson
No.
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tom (gast)
Structures. And I mean, let's face it, when you come to a big company where they want to automate, they do they do not directly have linguistical experts who help you design A flow that's always covered by IT people. And it's always technically dominated and that's the wrong thing.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah. And I and that kind of brings us back to these plate, the platform things. So they go all we've got all the tools. So we've got this thing they say it's a voice bot platform and then then they look at it and maybe a tech can look at it and figure it out and program it up and all that sort of stuff and make something. But like you said, there's no design in that process. There's no flow design. They will be on one words or they'll be just, it'll be a very robotic story and that's just not how you'd like. I said you make it.
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Steve Tomkinson
That a successful but in addition to that you've got different language flows. So if you're in a talking in a different language.
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tom (gast)
Yes.
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Steve Tomkinson
Do you know what we're and talking to English in the moment? But you know, if you say, oh, well, in a different language, the tone and the intonation and the phrasing is actually quite different. So to then understand that language. So if you're doing something in French, saying something in English totally different, you know, there's a different flow.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Hmm.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
Yeah, well, you're right. I mean, it is both cultural and language structure. So if you, if you would say for instance in English yesterday I bought a car and in German we have a guest on in out of the Gulf. So the car in English comes lost and in German we have the verbs around the car. And so that is easy.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Now.
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tom (gast)
But if you are going to talk about variables and you're going to talk about amounts of money or dates, it's a very important in in what place the date in the sentence comes to make the concatenation right? So for instance, when you make a design in English, you can just press a button and let Google do the translation because the translation will be incorrect and will not work. So that's why. And that's one thing. So the structure of the language is one thing, but also the culture of people, I mean.
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tom (gast)
And in in the northwestern European countries, we have a tendency to be quite directly in our communication.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.
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tom (gast)
And we would say that I do not agree or something or I don't like the solution you go when you go to the Latin countries in Europe, they would never go that direct, they say, well, I like the solution, but maybe I have another idea about it. And so this is also something we need to respect. So it's not only it's not only the language structure but also the culture of the country.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yep.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah, yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
If you're going to be direct in a in an application that does collections and you wanna escalate the message to the people who are not going to pay and you are only the slightest rude, it will not work. You have to be very polite all the time and you can be a little bit more direct, maybe in English or in Dutch. I'm sure about that, but that's the difference. Cultural difference and we the voice needs to be designed by a designer who understands that.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah, yeah.
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tom (gast)
It doesn't do it doesn't do it itself.
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Steve Tomkinson
No, and and and that is, you know it's it's it just highlights the importance of the whole design structure because you know most of us, uh, you know, we trade in English. Fortunately English is the business, the business language for us. But there's so many cultural differences that it doesn't matter if you're even talking English to an audience. The tone and the directness and and all that kind of politeness, even across the Atlantic. So if you go to the Americans, the Americans will deal with the English.
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Steve Tomkinson
It's, you know, it's their primary language, if you like. And and it's the same difference, you know.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah, yeah.
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tom (gast)
Think about humor, for instance, making jokes. How how, how, how cultural, determined that is. I mean, a German joke is really not that funny.
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Steve Tomkinson
Alright, we just lost them. Well, I'm not sure we had a German audience, but we've lost them now anyway.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
No, I'm just joking. I'm just joking. Yeah. No. But you know, you, you get my drift, right? It's it's it's it's not only language structure. It's also the way people do interact with their language. And that's very much a cultural thing.
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Steve Tomkinson
Yeah, at night? Yeah, absolutely. Right. I'll look, I I suppose the the whole irony of this and the the reason why we why, you know, I wanted to get you on the podcast and actually start talking about this is that the requirements is there we've got investment in the voice box being part of big platforms. That's huge. That's a lot of money that people are paying for that genesis of it and all the rest of them they are spending big monies in here but I don't feel that the clients taking them up nearly as much as they are because they just don't know where to start and it's a blank sheet of paper.
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Steve Tomkinson
And they just gave no real support from Unspecialized platform people who are more interested, like you said in the technical stuff. And I think, you know, just wrapping this up now it's it's about conversational design. You wanna make something right where you know we can provide.
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Steve Tomkinson
If you get the right people, then like ourselves, of course you know you can get, you know, the design, but also Technical Support to integrate into things as well. But it means you know that is a required thing. Now you've got to get somebody in to start this process off for you. Maybe it's we upskill people in the business, whatever it may be. But the point is it's very unlikely that that's the scenario. But the demand for voicebots.
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Steve Tomkinson
And taking the cure away for customers, clients and all the rest of this massive now.
0:19:33.390 --> 0:19:33.900
Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
0:19:36.450 --> 0:19:36.740
Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
0:19:39.930 --> 0:19:40.250
Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
0:19:47.450 --> 0:19:47.920
Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
0:19:52.790 --> 0:19:53.50
Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
Yeah. I mean in, in my experience, the last 20 years, I have met very few people who are technicians with a feel for language and designers with a feel for the technique, that work together on creating speech technology applications. So this is rare. And but I mean to me it's the only requirement to be become successful because the technique needs to be fully voiced, focused and.
0:19:57.50 --> 0:19:57.280
Steve Tomkinson
Yeah.
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tom (gast)
The design needs to be fully languaged connected and if you bring those together, I think we have a formula.
0:20:0.640 --> 0:20:8.500
Steve Tomkinson
Yeah, OK, well, let's. I hope that was interesting for everybody. And thanks very much for your time. Again, Tom was superb.
0:20:9.10 --> 0:20:24.390
Steve Tomkinson
Umm, uh. If you want us to talk about subject, then please e-mail in info@disruptionworks.co.uk and we're more than happy to pick the subject up and have a chat about it. But until next time, thank you very much and thanks again, Tom. Appreciate it.
0:20:24.290 --> 0:20:25.540
tom (gast)
You're welcome. Bye bye.
0:20:25.710 --> 0:20:27.230
Steve Tomkinson
Alright, cheers now thanks.
0:20:27.510 --> 0:20:27.670
tom (gast)
Yep.