Online brokerage Tradek.com has added a new service to its offering - a voice portal.
CEO Paul Theron says clients calling the service encounter an automated voice guide, "Andy", which talks callers through the process.
When prompted, the caller says his or her JSE account number. An added security code is optional.
The system then reads the account details and can also provide live prices of shares on watch lists, which are maintained by users on the Tradek Web site.
Theron says if Andy has problems understanding callers, they can also key in their account numbers if they use a touchtone phone
He adds that after experiencing initial problems, the service is now up and running.
Tradek`s Sasha Naryshkine says the voice portal is powered by the SpeecHTML service from Vocalis. The entire service is ASP-based so there was no need for any hardware or software to be added to Tradek`s infrastructure.
"The solution was extremely clean and easy to implement and the initial problems that we had were all coding problems," he says. "The Vocalis installation makes an HTTP request to our Web server in exactly the same way a standard browser would, but instead of interpreting the code into a page, the system reads the page to the caller using the latest text-to-speech engines available.
"The Vocalis SpeecHTML service is intelligent in that it automatically reads out options (hyperlinks, radio buttons, etc) to the caller."
Naryshkine says a caller simply says out loud what he or she would want to listen to. There is no need for the caller to have to wait and for traditional interactive voice response (IVR) commands (push "one" for this, "five" for that).
Being ASP-based, Vocalis ensures that Tradek continuously has the latest speech recognition and text-to-speech engines powering the portal. This enables any plain HTML page (in a certain format) to be read by the Vocalis software.
"Simply by entering your account number you are then able to hear your portfolio over the phone in exactly the same way that you would view it on the Web. The service can be used at any given time. Obviously the prices on your portfolio would be the last information received and you would receive the same data if you phoned out of market hours."
He adds that the service received more than 70 calls yesterday with the average duration being two minutes and 17 seconds. The service allows for 20 simultaneous users.
"This technology bridges a gap which now allows our clients to phone one number and have access to their watch lists and portfolios. They do not have to remember different codes for different share prices which is the case with standard IVR services."
Asked how the system differs from other dial-in share information services, such as Shareline, he says callers can access both their portfolios and all the prices they need on the same call, rather than making several calls.
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