Positioned as a virtual receptionist and personal assistant, EVA connects internal and external callers to their destination quickly and efficiently, while ensuring, according to the vendor, a return on investment for enterprise customers of just a few months.
Quentris was able to develop EVA in just 2.5 months using the Envox Communications Development Platform.
"EVA is a great example of how the Envox Communications Development Platform is being used by our partners to create compelling voice solutions," said Mark D. Flanagan, president and CEO of Envox Worldwide. "Quentris was able to respond to their customers' needs and requirements in record time. EVA is a best-in-class solution created by a first class developer"
EVA uses high quality, natural language, multi-lingual speech recognition and text-to-speech technology to communicate with callers in English, French or Dutch. It is able to understand names pronounced in all three languages. It records callers' language preferences using a 'caller card' system that ensures that all future calls are automatically conducted in the appropriate language.
Callers are able to ask for a department, service or individual by name in a free text format that accepts the use of abbreviations and nicknames. If the requested party is not available, EVA provides a dynamic list of options for each destination, such as transferring the caller to a personal assistant, mobile phone, voicemail or a live operator. If the call takes place outside of working hours, EVA automatically recognises the time of the call and responds with an appropriate message. Thanks to a 'barge-in' function, callers can interrupt EVA at any point to request help, or to opt-out of the system and speak with a live operator.
As a result of its user-friendly, thin-client, Web-based interface, EVA is easy and cost-effective for organisations to deploy and manage.
Existing staff directories can be imported into the system to enable immediate operation, and administrators can simply and easily update phonetic information for difficult names to ensure accurate pronunciation in all three languages. Users are able to personalise and change settings such as call forwarding destinations from any phone.
Additional features such as advanced time-of-day management, personalised greetings, customised on-hold music, personal directories, caller announcements and call-back requests are currently being developed. Existing users will be able to access these new features on request.
"From a technological point of view, the Envox Communications Development Platform simplifies the creation of telephony, text-to-speech, and advanced speech recognition solutions," said Peter Edel, advanced technology manager, Quentris. "Working with the Envox platform enables us to focus our attention on the needs of our customers; we do not have to spend our time resolving technical issues and working out how to do things. Furthermore, since Envox offers a wide array of integration features, speech applications such as EVA can be easily adapted to many other standards like LDAP, XML and database access. If we want to integrate EVA with mobile applications and email for example, we can quickly do so thanks to the existing capabilities of the Envox Communications Development Platform."