Escape from the Voicemail Gauntlet: AT&T's How May I Help You?
	"Please select from the following eight options. Listen carefully, as our menus have changed." Nobody likes to be caught in the voicemail maze. Many users punch "0" right away, hoping to reach a human being. Others simply hang up in frustration. Yet organizations that run large call centers have had little choice; the complexities of customer service are too great to be handled by expensive live operators alone. Steve Rappaport, AT&T Program Manager for Inbound Services, calls current voicemail systems "the gauntlet". And AT&T Labs has come up with the way out. The new How May I Help You? system lets customers talk naturally and be understood by the system itself. It's far more advanced than the simple programs which ask the caller to "Press or say 'one'." No more carefully speaking simple number responses. No more taking notes on what buttons to press to get through the maze fastest. Callers hear the comforting prompt, "AT&T. How may I help you?" Then they respond in their own words at their own pace. HMIHY understands not only the words but also the context, picking out key words and phrases to determine what the caller may need. It is now the machine's job to understand what people say, rather than vice-versa. HMIHY uses advanced speech recognition and patent-pending machine learning technology to extract meaning from speech, finding what are known as "salient fragments". Using this information to determine caller needs, HMIHY can forward the call to the appropriate department. But it can also respond on its own in useful ways. For example, the system could ask a follow-up question. "The system might hear the word 'Credit'," says Rappaport. "It could then respond by asking whether the customer is talking about a credit card or a credit to her account." Tests on live customer traffic at AT&T call centers have shown that over 95% of calls can be handled by HMIHY without ever resorting to a live operator. For example, just by listening and responding, the system can place a collect call, announce it to the person who answers, and put the call through if it's accepted. HMIHY actually learns as it goes, adapting to the wide world of accents, slang, vocabulary, and dialect. Larry Crenshaw, Technical Manager at the AT&T Technology Center, ran a demonstration of HMIHY at the recent FOSE tradeshow in Washington, DC. Twenty different operator services applications were showcased. "The system could do thousands of things," says Crenshaw. By monitoring customer service calls over a period of time, the most common questions are categorized and turned into a detailed database of responses. "It would be great for any government agency that answer a lot of inquiries from the public, like benefits questions, an information hotline, or a DMV." "This system is perfect for agencies that have large call center applications or high volumes of database lookup, " adds Rappaport. "It can handle the many tasks that don't require the unique intelligence of a human being." Operational installations are expected to roll out this year. As the new economy brings expanded services to an ever-growing customer base, AT&T initiatives like How May I Help You? will help organizations keep costs low and customer satisfaction high.
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