OnviSource Introduces Explora Speech Analytics Software

OnviSource yesterday rolled out OnviCord Explora, a new speech analytics solution incorporated into its OnviCenter 6 suite of customer interaction management solutions.

Explora is built on phonetic audio search technology and features integrated audio, screen data, and transaction workflow. It also provides audio mining in customer interaction management, quality monitoring and adherence, sales and marketing opportunity detection, and business intelligence gathering.

"Explora is much more than just a speech analytics engine," says John Hird, vice president of business development and product marketing at OnviSource. "It’s integrated into our workforce optimization products. So that means you can now search for recordings by looking for phrases. You can improve your quality assurance or compliance monitoring of calls for your clients by using Explora to automate the initial screening process and then just focus call of interest to your quality management review team."

Explora uses a phonetic engine to provide audio search and analysis of speech content. The audio search does not rely on dictionaries, static grammar, or the need to convert speech to text.

"We did a lot of research as we were looking for core technology and we have integrated with the latest generation—in fact it became available in July of 2008—it is the fifth generation of phonetics engine from Aurix in the UK," Hird says. "[Aurix] spun out this technology of an engine looking for phrases and what we’ve done is integrate that into our applications to deliver value to contact centers."

According to Hird, Explora’s affordability makes the new product unique. "That’s one of the key aspects of our technology," he says. "Our corporate strategy is to deliver a stack of workforce optimization products that are all fully interoperation and integrated…Our workforce optimization suite is designed to be cost effective for small contact centers, maybe with 20 seats up to thousands of seats."

Hird says OnviSource’s mission is to make optimization products—previously available primarily to large call centers—affordable, usable, and attractive to small call centers.  

"Explora is another example of bringing what earlier, in 2000, was only affordable to the large call centers," he says. "We’re making it affordable so that a 20 seat call center can realize an ROI in just a few months."

According to Hird, Explora will soon be deployed at its call centers in Oklahoma and Texas. "An interesting part of the OnviSource business model is that we really have two business units," he says. "We have a software development and sales organization that focuses on workforce optimization software and we have an outsourcing call center where we operate our software and we learn how to differentiate our call center, improve its performance, really improve the bottom line. And as we learn ways to do that we roll that back into our software and offer that software to the industry. So it’s a real synergistic model…It’s our own test bed. It’s our own product validation bed."

The product life cycle for speech analytics, according to Hird, is approaching the point where deployments in call centers will become more and more common.

"We’re lowering the price to such a point that…rather than speech analytics being deployed in three or four or five percent of call centers…it should be deployed in 50 percent of call centers within the next several years," he says. "I think this will begin a surge of deployments. It now becomes practical for everyone."