The Voice Banking package, like those to come, is built on a modular code base that Edify introduced in August.
With Edify Voice Banking, customers calling into a phone system can verbally identify themselves, their account, and their requests without traversing a touch-tone menu. Customers benefit from being able to interact with a friendly, conversational system that provides efficient access to the available banking information they might need, Edify said.
Natural language isn't easy to get right. "How you ask the questions is important in order to get the customer to give short, concise answers," chief technical officer Ken Wahn said. A voice system, he added, must allow not only for ethnic and regional accents, but also for differences of speech pattern such as the South's "yes, ma'am" rather than simply "yes." Edify uses speech-recognition and text-to-speech engines from Nuance and ScanSoft SpeechWorks.
The system uses voice print analysis for verification of identity. Wahn said that this method yields 1 in 10,000 false negatives, versus 1 in 100 for PINs. For highly sensitive transactions such as a large wire transfer, both can be used. Voice print identity verification eliminates the need for questions about mother's maiden name, city of birth, and so on, which also have higher false negatives.
Edify Voice Banking is scalable from 4 to 9,000 ports. Conforming to Voice XML 2.0, it is deployable to a native Edify environment, Edify's Voice XML, or Voice XML products by Avaya and other vendors. Wahn said that a future release will support Microsoft's speech server.
Pricing ranges from $1,100 to $1,400 per port, depending on complexity of the solution and number of ports.
