In the May issue of Communications Convergence Magazine, we ran several interrelated pieces on speech-rec based auto attendants. You know? The kind of telephone answering system wherein you can simply speak a name and get transferred, instead of touchtoning an extension.
We think most people will agree that Automatic Speech Rec (ASR) is finally ready to bloom with sophisticated IVR systems, where it can really pay dividends in call containment percentages. But do we really need it at the low end of voice/call processing? The basic Auto Attendant.
Well, we're not sure there's an answer to that question yet. We do know that it will never take off if it's a pain in the neck to set up, or, worse, it flat out doesn't work.
So we asked vendors to send CT Labs pre-assembled ASR-AA systems with a single T-1 phone port or 8 to 16 POTS (analog) phone ports, support for a names directory containing at least 1,000 names, phone system support for performing standard hook-flash call transfers, and full product documentation set, including installation instructions and administrative guide(s).
In order to do some performance measurement, the Labs would connect the system to a Empirix Hammer IT automated call generator using 4 POTS (analog) lines through a Skutch AS-66 Telephone Line Simulator. For manual evaluation and functionality tests, the unit would be connected to two manual phones via a Teltone TLE.
During the automated tests, the HammerIT Automated Call Generator would place calls into the system and play pre-recorded audio files of 500 of the names in the directory that we imported. The Hammer then notes if calls are sent to the correct extensions for the name that's "spoken" or if the system doesn't understand or transfers calls to wrong extensions.
As alluded to back in the May issue, the increasingly bizarre iVoice organization (what convoluted stock plan was announced this week? didn't perform; the EsnaTech Telephony Office-LinX enterprise edition did.
Executive Summary
The EsnaTech Telephony Office-LinX enterprise edition is a lot more than just an auto attendant. It supports many features including unified messaging and instant messaging, but this test focused on the automated speech recognition auto-attendant capabilities. This component of the product comes with many features including support for eight different languages.
CT Labs found the turnkey Telephony Office-LinX product to be easy to install and configure; they did find it a little tricky to correctly import the 500 users into the Telephony Office-LinX database using the LDAP Import Tool.
The Telephony Office-LinX documentation and online help were easy to navigate and they found it easy to find desired topics -- the only negative was a lack of troubleshooting help.
The administrative user interfaces were well-designed and easy to navigate. The auto attendant's voice-controlled and telephone user interfaces supported the ability to locate a user by extension or by name. Telephony Office-LinX performed exceptionally well in the automated performance tests -- with over 96% first-time recognition accuracy for both 1-line and 12-line tests. Excellent!
Overall, we found that Telephony Office-LinX to be a very good ASR AA solution.
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The following are the results of the CT Labs evaluation of the EsnaTech Telephony Office-LinX ASR AA product:
