IntelliSPEECH®: In the customer's own words
Story by Les Shaw, Assistant IT Director, University of Maine
At the University of Maine, we were being challenged in a number of ways to provide directory service in a manner that would satisfy a diverse campus population. Public Safety was requesting 24-hour service, Faculty and Staff were asking for weekend service, and in addition we had difficulty retaining Operators. Full-Time staffing was not the answer, so we looked for ways to have technology help out. Through our research, Speech Recognition seemed like the right answer. We were able to cost-justify the purchase quite easily by not filling the vacant operator position and by proposing that we no longer have a full-page ad in our local provider's phone book that was costing us about $20,000 per year. As a bonus, a speech application would allow us to provide the additional services requested by the campus.
Our RFP provided us with a select group of vendors and from them we chose System Development Company of NH, Inc., and IntelliSPEECH because of price and quality. We presently have over 6,000 names in the system, running eight channels which process over 5,000 calls a week with better than 98% accuracy. Our PBX is a Nortel SL-100 and uses analog channels to interface to IntelliSPEECH.
We have not been disappointed by our decision. SDC is great to work with and continues to keep in contact to see how things are going. They provide reports on a weekly basis and work with us to make the software function as advertised. As in all manner of things, we have found that there are a few people who simply do not like any automated system, but for the most part, it has been very well-accepted. We have created a two-digit code for on-campus access and all incoming calls are directed through the IntelliSPEECH system. In the past, our two operators were handling between 700 and 1,000 calls a day. With the system, we no longer had to fill the vacant operator position and the remaining operator now only handles between 200 and 300 calls a day.
The biggest surprise to me was the way on-campus people accepted the system. We first placed it in service for experimentation and usage and the number of calls was incredible. We found that everyone stopped looking up numbers and simply called and spoke the name. I received a lot of very positive comments about the ease of use and convenience. And I haven't taken out my phone book since the installation.
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