International Business Machines Corporation

Anthony Timothy Farrell

John Brian Pickering

Gary James Calder

Robert James Mann

George Murdoch Clelland

Paul Reilly

This invention relates to the automated assistance of a telephony call center agent comprising a method and system for providing dialogue suggestions to an agent during an agent caller interaction. A prior art solution provides data based on analyzed text from one or other of the conversations but does not offer any useful information based on the performance of the agent or on the state of the interaction. A method of interaction in a voice response application comprising: receiving a voice signal in a call center; identifying whether the caller or a call center agent is the originator of the voice signal; converting the voice signal into computer readable text; identifying a key word such as a confrontational phrase e.g. 'what are you talking about' in the converted computer readable text; and providing a different suggestion depending on whether the originator is the call agent or the caller. For instance, a suggestion if the agent made the confrontational phrase would be to use a less confrontational phrase next time such as 'can you explain that again'. A suggestion if the caller made the confrontational phrase would be to counter with a &lsquo;I'll try to explain that better&rsquo;.

Call centre agent automated assistance

Speech encoding in a client server system such as a laptop, personal data assistant or mobile phone communicating with an interactive voice response telephony application. A method of communication with a speech enabled remote telephony device such as a mobile phone is described comprising the following steps. Receiving user speech input into the mobile phone as part of a dialogue with an interactive voice response telephony application. Performing speech recognition to convert the speech into text and converting the text into tones such as DTMF tones. Transmitting the DTMF tones over the voice channel to an interactive voice response (IVR) telephony application an allowed response feature converts the users response to a known valid response of the IVR application. A language conversion feature allows a person in one language to speak in that language to an IVR application operating in a different language.

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Hampshire, United Kingdom

Anthony Timothy Farrell