Industry observer Saul Marcus wrote recently how Andrew McAfee, a research scientist at MIT who studies how digital technology affects the business world, asked him that very question. Marcus says McAfee believes “high quality” machine translation will have a huge impact on business.
Note the qualifier, “high quality.” As in, not the two-year old variety. “By customizing language models with the terminology and phraseology of the domain of interest, you can elevate the machine translation quailty for content (such as FAQs, knowledgebases, etc.) specific to that domain,” Marcus says, adding that such improvements are genuinely quantifiable: “With customization, you can train machine translation language models to produce higher quality, more actionable translation.”
What McAfee told Marcus is that if you immerse a two-year old in a foreign language environment, “that child will be fluent in a matter of a couple of years if not months. If you immerse a forty-five year old in a foreign country, he or she might never become fluent.”
Almost one year ago TMCnet reported that AppTek, a provider of human language technology “HLT,” has released Chinese language for its hybrid machine translation “HMT” system.
Read more here.
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Last year Paul Wiggins, the ReliaTel Convergence Technology Manager at Tone Software, wrote about what he believes to be four key steps to selecting a voice communications management platform. Specifically, he addressed what he sees as the criteria enterprises should use to identify the platform that supports their environment today “and in the future.”
While nothing in this industry is carved in stone, Wiggins’s observations are good to keep in mind when making your own decisions.
Wiggins believes it’s smart to deploy non-proprietary management that supports a wide range of technologies because converged environments tend to be a mix of technologies, and the mix will change in the future. You probably don’t want to be locked into management tools limited to a specific vendor’s devices and metrics because when problems occur, you’ll need to spot and resolve the problem by gathering and analyzing data from multiple proprietary tools.
And, as Wiggins says, if you don’t have a single, unified view across this variety of devices, it will be much harder to do. A non-proprietary, vendor-agnostic product offering true convergence management across the range of TDM, VoIP, IP network, and converged communications technologies from all major manufacturers will serve you best as your needs grow more complex.
Read more here.
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Hey, how do staff remote agents for your call center, anywhere in the world sound?
If your call center’s pretty close to normal, over the years there have probably been some struggles to improve agent satisfaction and reduce agent attrition. According to Five9, due to the increased adoption of VoIP, virtual call center technology, and outsourced call centers, “companies have recognized that staffing at-home agents can offer lower operational costs, more rewarding agent and customer experiences, and ultimately improved employee retention rates.”
In other words, your agent problems might be greatly reduced.
The Five9 Agent app is entirely browser-based, company officials say: “As long as they have an Internet connection and a USB headset, agents can log into the system from anywhere in the world.” This means supervisors can monitor their remote agents as effectively as if they were in the same building.
This summer TMC’s Rajaini Baburajan wrote that Five9 Network Systems announced collaboration with Fusion-io, a pioneer in next generation storage memory platform for data decentralization.
The partnership enables high-density deployment of Fusion ioDrive technology integrated into Five9NS “S” series platform.
Read more here.
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Five9 officials have announced an IVR with Speech Recognition product, billing it as one with tools for better service and support.
Company officials say it can be used for IVR self-service apps to provide touch-tone or speech input, depending on preference or the circumstances of the call: “Using advanced speech recognition technology, the Five9 IVR will analyze spoken input and provide an appropriate response, including confirmations and error prompts for cases when the speech recognition engine cannot effectively hear the caller's input.”
Read more here.
