Call Recording System Identifies Agents by Voice

VirtualLogger has released AgentPrescience, a new hosted system that leverages speaker recognition technologies to identify which agents answer or make calls on recordings.

AgentPrescience identifies the agent along with the caller identification and other information normally needed to search for and find recordings. To register her voiceprint, an agent dials into the system and answers a few key questions. It takes about a minute for the system to build the voice model. Once all agent voices are registered, the installation is complete and the system is ready to go.

“The whole process is really pretty simple,” says Jim Veilleux, president of VirtualLogger.

Recognition Technologies supplied the speaker identification technology for the application, which is housed at VirtualLogger’s central operations facility. The actual call recordings and agent identification processes are done at that facility. Once the call recording starts, the agent identification process takes anywhere from 15 seconds to about a minute, depending on the call volume and the number of agents in the database, Veilleux says

“I don’t know that we have a limit on the number of agents who can be registered, but we feel very confident that we can handle any agent pool of up to about 500 agents,” he adds.

Accuracy of the system is probably at about 80 percent, and the application provides a match probability score with each recording indexed. For most purposes that a call center would listen to recordings, the match percentage “is more than adequate,” Veilleux says. “And the average call center listens to less than 1 percent of the calls it receives.”

The application’s accuracy could be enhanced by adding speech recognition that will identify when the agent gives the caller her name and can add that to the recording as well, Veilleux adds. He also points out that the system can adjust for changes in the agent’s speech, like when she has a cold.

This new, patent-pending approach streamlines the installation process for call recording technologies by eliminating the need for computer telephony integration or other telephone system data integration and the need for complex "channel mapping, which shows the relationship between the telephone lines that the recorder is connected to and the channel on the recorder. It allows "trunk side" side recording, and since AgentPrescience can identify the agent without knowing which specific phone is recorded, no tap to the station lines is required;.

Using the VirtualLogger Software as a Service model, recordings can be accessed from anywhere using the secure VirtualLogger Web interface. And because all of the other information needed to identify a call (caller ID, number dialed, etc.) is easily available from the public telephone line, everything a call center needs for quality monitoring, regulatory compliance, and other uses is available with AgentPrescience.

A 48-agent recording setup starts at $3,120, including all required hardware and software.