Yellow Messenger and Microsoft strengthen collaboration to transform voice virtual assistants

Yellow Messenger has announced a collaboration with Microsoft to transform its voice automation solution using Azure AI Speech Services and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. With this initiative, Yellow Messenger aims to increase the accuracy of its voice bot solutions and help enterprises across sectors in enhancing consumer experience automation. Under this collaboration, Microsoft and Yellow Messenger’s R&D team will be working on building a more human-like voice assistant platform that is capable of understanding and responding on the basis of sentiment, dialect, and workflow.

According to industry estimates, 60-70% of overall business to customer interactions across the world take place through telephony today, while the rest is over chats and email. Conversational interfaces are changing how customers relate to brands and ‘voice’ is playing a key role in enabling smarter brand-to-consumer engagement. Through the collaboration with Microsoft, Yellow Messenger is enabling brands to increase their sophistication and usage of automated voice assistants for regular use.  Voice-based virtual assistants can be deployed to handle inbound and outbound calls, across real-time telephony and synchronous voice channels.

Raghu Ravinutala, CEO and Cofounder, Yellow Messenger said, “Voice, as compared to text, is a more complex channel due to multiple factors at play such as the real-time experience, varying accents by country and legacy architecture. Our collaboration with Microsoft’s Azure Speech Services is empowering us to build customised voice models that allow higher accuracy and better intent understanding. Our voice assistants can hold natural conversations in over 35 languages and their variants across channels and devices enabled by our speech-to-text(STT) and text-to-speech(TTS) cognitive services.”

According to Sashikumar Sreedharan, Managing Director – Microsoft India, “More human interactions mean new opportunities. Azure Cognitive Services help people interact simply and naturally with technology and make engagement with services more human, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. We believe our collaboration will help Yellow Messenger transform voice automation and enable enterprises across industries to take their customer relationships to a new level.”

Yellow Messenger has natively integrated Azure Cognitive Services on its platform, for improved customer experience and operational efficiency without compromising on security. This covers the following areas:

1. Accurate understanding and conversion of end customers’ voice to text across channels, using Azure’s real time Speech to Text (STT) translation capabilities for more intuitive interaction. Azure STT allows tailoring speech of recognition models to adapt to users’ speaking styles, expressions, and unique vocabularies, and also to accommodate background noises, accents, and voice patterns.  This is being implemented for customers across industries, including banking, FMCG and the public sector.
2. Improved voice output for end customers on telephony and web channels, applying Azure Text to Speech (TTS) services. Following the processing of the user’s inbound query, the bot converts the text back to speech and responds to the user in near real time in a natural, lifelike voice.
3. Building custom voice bot models using the Azure Speech stack for specific industry verticals such as banking for higher accuracy.
4. Self-serve customer support – Two of India’s largest private banks are currently using Yellow Messenger’s voice virtual assistants for inbound and outbound customer service. Up to 65% support queries can be addressed and resolved by voice AI assistants so that customer care teams can focus on critical issues.

Yellow Messenger enables enterprises, in a rapidly booming digital economy, to shift from being digitized to delivering cognitive experiences. Through the platform, enterprises can build AI-workers to self-serve, support, sales, marketing, commerce, HR and IT on-demand, across chat, email, and voice channels.

Microsoft Cognitive Services is a collection of intelligent APIs that allow systems to see, hear, speak, understand, and interpret human needs using natural methods of communication. Developers can use these APIs to make their applications across platforms more intelligent, engaging, and discoverable. Available at www.microsoft.com/cognitive, it includes APIs on:

• Vision: From faces to feelings, allow apps to understand images and video
• Speech: Hear and speak to users by filtering noise, identifying speakers, and understanding intent
• Language: Process text and learn how to recognize what users want
• Knowledge: Tap into rich knowledge amassed from the web, academia, or your own data
• Search: Locate relevant information among billions of web pages, images, videos, and news with the power of Bing APIs