Audio portals give the Web a voice

From...

by Bob Trott

(IDG) -- When Ken Jackowitz learned that customers were asking Office Depot's automated audio portal about the weather, he knew he was on to something, even though Office Depot's first impressions of voice technology weren't exactly stellar.

This was not because the idea of creating an audio portal wasn't an appealing one, says Jackowitz, Office Depot's vice president of business systems, who loves the idea of giving customers a broad array of options when interacting with the Delray Beach, Fla.-based office-supply giant.

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The company already had a back-end infrastructure in place about a year ago, thanks to some planning ahead by its IT department; however, a disappointed Jackowitz put the audio project on the back burner "because the technology just was not that great."

Now, though, Office Depot has a sophisticated audio portal that is producing a return on investment Jackowitz calls "awesome."

More and more, the Internet talks back. Audio portals are gaining wider acceptance, as voice technology has finally become stable and easier to use. E-tailers and other businesses are adding audio to their mix, usually in CRM (customer relationship management), such as in Office Depot's system, or as a logical outgrowth of the Web designed to enrich the online shopping experience.

Office Depot is very pleased with the number of high-volume orders coming through the system. The audio call-center portal is so intuitive that callers sometimes forget they are dealing with technology -- particularly with the "Do you need more time?" feature.

"I spoke with one customer who said, 'I told the system I needed more time, and [the portal voice] started to hum, and eventually I started to ask her how the weather was there,'" Jackowitz remembers. "You don't feel like you're talking to a robotic system," he says.

Another kind of computer chat

"Having audio cues and the opportunity to participate in an almost literal verbal dialogue of some kind in order to call attention to a feature is absolutely critical," says Ben Elstein, carrier and enterprise communications research analyst at Aberdeen Group, in Boston.

"These solutions are really exciting," he adds. "They make the Internet fundamentally better by bringing all the dynamics of real-world shopping or real-world customer experiences to the Web. That's just cool."

Vendors are fighting it out in the audio portal space, from familiar names such as RealNetworks and Yahoo Broadcast to software makers such as NetByTel, BeVocal, and Beatnik.

"The first attempts embraced information access and not commerce," says George White, senior vice president of technology and interfaces at NetByTel. "The next phase was commerce, phones connected to Web sites. Now voice portals are accepting phone calls and retrieving information from Web databases, ... databases that would normally be driving Web sites."

It was Boca Raton, Fla.-based NetByTel that turned Jackowitz and Office Depot around on the idea of audio portal technology. After their initial disappointment, the two companies put their heads together and came up with a system that met Jackowitz's needs. Office Depot committed to the project last June, and the system was up and talking by Aug. 31.

Now Office Depot runs seven of NetByTel's voice modules, which plug in to NetByTel's back-end infrastructure. Jackowitz says CRM costs have gone down considerably, and Office Depot is looking to further refine the system to "make the transaction as punchy as possible" by reducing the number of prompts customers need to use.

Another vendor of telephone-based audio portal technology, BeVocal, in Sunnyvale, Calif., has corralled Sprint and Qwest as customers for technology aimed at providing Web access via telephones. BeVocal licenses content from MapQuest, AccuWeather, and others, wraps its voice user-interface around it, and makes it available to users through its telephony server infrastructure.

"The voice portal space has raised a lot of money from venture capitalists who think it's a great opportunity, but it's just now getting to the point where customers actually are buying these things and exposing their customers to them," says BeVocal Marketing Vice President Mark Robinson, who believes the top 10 wireless carriers in the United States will deploy audio portal technology "by the end of this year or shortly thereafter."

On the Internet, e-tailers such as Giorgio Armani and Macy's are adding audio portal technology to their Web sites in hopes of making the shopping experience more like walking into a store. At Macys.com, for example, clicking on the Audio Tip button brings up a message pushing the store's Valentine's Day offerings, telling shoppers, "We're here to offer suggestions and provide convenience to help you express your love."

Another effective audio Web portal is SchwabWelcome.com, where founder and CEO Charles Schwab narrates a tour of the investment bank's introductory Web site, describing the services his company offers.

"If you're going into a branch office, a representative greets you and helps you identify what your needs are," says Craig Martin, vice president of business development for Schwab's Electronic Brokerage Enterprise, in San Francisco. "This online experience provides a good way of learning about the company, and we can tailor our message to what [a user's] particular needs are."

The audio portion of Schwab's site, built on Sausalito, Calif.-based AudioBase's Java-based streaming audio solution, has been running since December. Martin says the rate of leads and new accounts generated by the site are on par with or higher than other online acquisition tools Schwab uses, such as banner ads.

"Users generally like having [audio] as a way of warming the experience up, making it more human," Martin says. "The main focus for us is to humanize the Web, to enhance the experience so it's not a secondary experience as opposed to going to a branch office."

Some, however, still view audio as a luxury they can do without. Such an attitude is misguided, Aberdeen's Elstein says, adding that "television has sound; store clerks talk; customer reps pick up the phone. Eliminating capabilities of a computer, like audio, is silly."

Talking on the Web

Companies interested in adding audio to their sites have a wide array of strategies and technologies to choose from, ranging from schemas to portal outsourcing.

Java: Java Audio is bandwidth-friendly and can be easily integrated into a Web page.

VoiceXML: The familiar XML infrastructure simplifies speech-recognition application development.

ASPs: Using a hosted audio-portal model can cut down on startup time and technology integration woes.

MPEG4: Although usually associated with video technologies, MPEG4 also affects the way audio is developed, particularly for handhelds and phone sets.

Sources: Aberdeen Group, VoiceXML Forum

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