Industry Glossary

Abandon Rate

The percentage of callers to a contact centre who hangup whilst waiting to speak to an agent.

Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)

A computerised phone system that responds to the caller with a voice menu and connects the call to the appropriate agent. It can also distribute calls equally to agents. ACDs are the heart of call centres, or contact centres, which are widely used in the telephone sales and service departments of all organisations.

Automated Speech Recognition (ASR)

Using voice recognition to replace keypad entry for telephone voice menus. Typically used to speak the digits 0 through 9 insted of keying them, ASR systems may be able to recognise a limited vocabulary.

Call Centre

A department within a company or a third-party organisation that handles telephone sales and/or service. Call centres use automatic call distributors (ACDs) to route calls to the appropriate agent.

Confidence

Speech recognisers provide an ordered list of possible things a caller may have said, each of which has a number defining how sure the system is that the caller actually said that utterance. This is the 'confidence'.

Customer Service Representative
(CSR)

A person who handles a customer's request regarding a bill, account changes or service or merchandise ordered. Agents in call centres are known as CSRs.

Computer Telephone Integration (CTI)

Combining data with voice systems in order to enhance telephone services. For example, automatic number identification (ANI) allows a caller's records to be retrieved from the database while the call is routed to the appropriate party. Automatic telephone dialing from an address list is an outbound example.

Dialog

A dialog refers to the naturally spoken words, phrases and sentences that make up the conversational roadmap of the voice application. A dialog defines what callers can say and what they will hear at any given stage of the interface.

Dual-Tone Multi Frequency (DTMF)

The type of audio signals that are generated when you press the buttons on a touch-tone telephone.

Equal Error Rate
(EER)

A measure of a speaker verification where the false acceptance rate equals the false rejection rate.

False Acceptance Rate
(FA)

The expected error rate for a speaker verification system as a percentage likelihood of an imposter being accepted by the system.

False Rejection Rate
(FR)

The expected error rate for a speaker verification system as a percentage likelihood of a genuine caller being rejected by the system.

Grammar

The set of words accepted by the speech recognition engine, for example, "yes", "okay" and "yeah" are all accepted forms of reply.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

An automated telephone information system that speaks to the caller with a combination of fixed voice menus and data extracted from databases in realtime. The caller responds by pressing digits on the telephone or speaking words or short phrases. Applications include 'bank-by-phone', 'flight-scheduling information' and automated order entry and tracking.

N-Best

Speech recognition systems typically provide more than one possible understanding of what the caller may have said, this is the n-best list.

Natural Language Speech Recognition
(NLSR)

"Natural language" refers to the ability of an ASR system to recognise words spoken in a conversational manner

Prompts

A prompt is the dialog played to a caller either to ask a question or to provide feedback. A prompt can be played from a pre-recorded file, generated from text, or a combination of the two.

Public Switched Telephone Network
(PSTN)

The worldwide voice telephone network. Once only an analog system, the heart of most telephone networks today is all digital.

Scripts

VoiceXML code designers use scripts to quickly and accurately define the dialog, the prompts to be played and what grammars are active (i.e., what the caller may say at any given point in the dialog).

Short Message Service
(SMS)

Short Message Service is a service for sending messages of up to 160 characters to mobile phones that use Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication. GSM and SMS service is primarily available in Europe. SMS is similar to paging. However, SMS messages do not require the mobile phone to be active and within range and will be held for a number of days until the phone is active and within range. SMS messages are transmitted within the same cell or to anyone with roaming capability. They can also be sent to digital phones from a website equipped with PC Link or from one digital phone to another.

Speaker verification

Speaker verification identifies a caller based on their vocal patterns. This feature enables a caller to identify themselves by voice rather than by entering a password for security purposes.

Speech recognition

Speech recognition provides the ability to match a voice pattern against a provided or acquired vocabulary.

Text-to-Speech
(TTS)

The process of converting electronic text to spoken words.
Text to Speech software converts text into audio output, enabling large quantities of text-based information to be heard over the telephone. TTS technology can be useful whenever a computerised application needs to communicate with a customer or user, and so is especially useful in telephone services.

Voice Over Internet Protocol
(VOIP)

VoIP is a term used in IP telephony for a set of facilities for managing the delivery of voice information using the Internet Protocol (IP). In general, this means sending voice information in digital form in discrete packets over the Internet rather than in the traditional circuit-committed protocols of the public switched telephone network (PSTN). A major advantage of VoIP and Internet telephony is that it avoids the tolls charged by ordinary telephone service. In addition to IP, VoIP uses the real-time protocol (RTP) to help ensure that packets get delivered in a timely way.

Voice Portal

Sometimes referred to as a vortal, is a website or other service that a user can reach by telephone to obtain information.

Voice Recogntion

Using voice recognition to replace keypad entry for telephone voice menus. Typically used to speak the digits 0 through 9 instead of keying them, ASR systems may be able to recognise a limited vocabulary.

Voice User Interface
(VUI)

Analogous to a Graphical User Interface (GUI), a VUI provides an interface for a user to access information and request services. A VUI utilizes speech recognition to interpret what the caller is requesting and respond accordingly. A customised voice user interface enhances a company's brand and provides a competitive advantage and greater ease of use, as customers are able to interact with the information they need simply by speaking naturally.

Voice Verification (Also known as voice authentication)

The process of positively identifying an individual based on a speech sampling called a voice print.

Voice XML (VXML)

VoiceXML is an application of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) which, when combined with voice recognition technology, enables interactive access to the web through the telephone or a voice-driven browser. Voice XML is emerging as the standard for speech recognition services and utilizes tags to describe dialogs and call flow.