Improves airline service standard with the application of SinoVoice's technology.

[alexstary]

As the competition in the airline industry getting more and more severe, the airline companies find it more and more difficult to get satisfying profit, or even to survive. Getting into new profitable market is one of the best ways to expand profit margin and earn advantages. China as an emerging market has gained more and more attention of the world. With 1.3 billion people and high developing speed in economy, there are huge commercial potential in Chinese airline market. As the global airline market suffered a 30 billion dollars' loss in year 2006, Chinese airline industry was recovering and progressing in an accelerated speed.

But the competition in Chinese airline market can also be harsh. As quite some companies have already been washed out from the airline industry and many survivals struggle to cut down their cost and to grab consumers from other competitors, how to develop the core competence, to find the most economic way to operate and to differ from the other airline corporations is the key to the success in the airline industry, not only in China, but in all over the world.

To find the innovation to cut the cost and improve the service standard decides whether you can win great advantage or not. Initiative thinking is needed to re-observe the traditional service and find ways to do it better. One of the outdated services that costs a lot and staggers in improving service standard is the call center.

Airline companies recruit hundreds of people and train them to serve the customer, answer their questions, make reservation for them and so on. Although the recruiters have find ways to lower this cost, such as moving the call center to some developing countries, where human resource is cheaper, they still need to pay for the training bill and face the blames from some welfare communities. Although they have begun to find other ways to replace people-to-people service, such as e-ticket, to cut down expenses, huge sum of money is still wasted on call centers for their low efficiency.

With the development of technologies, there is the opportunity to solve this problem now. There are the Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology and Automation-Speech-Recognition (ASR) technologies that can take place the outdated call centers. There techniques are invaluable and convenient. The TTS technology can read your pre-written text to the customer, while the ASR can 'understand' what the consumer say on the phone, take it as command and respond according to your arrangement. No mankind is needed in the process. For example, there is the enquiry service in the traditional call center, when a customer calls and asks for the schedule and cost of a specific airline, the operator has to look it up and read it out for the customer. The operator might take time to find the information or read it wrongly. Now, with the new technology, the system can understand what your customer requires, it will find the correspondent information in no time and read it out in natural human voice. No mistake will happen meanwhile and huge training fees can be saved.

It is just one application of the voice technology; it can do more than that. With the knowledge of the airlines available and the ticket fees informed, the customers can book the tickets over phone. Once a reservation is made, the information can be sent to the customers' portable ends, such as PDAs and mobile phones. The customer can even avoid the trouble to find a computer and log onto the Internet. The convenience of making reservation will bring apparent advantage to your company and differentiate you from your competitors.

The key issues deciding whether this technology can be adopted successfully are as follows:

1. The accuracy of recognizing people's voice, including recognizing voices of different quality and accents, telling voice from the background noises, etc.

2. The integration of the TTS and ASR technologies, so that the system can both understand the customer and respond to them.

3. The deep understanding of the specific language spoken, so the system can understand the customer in the context and understand its appropriate meaning.

4. The ability to extend the present services and integrate them to the other apparatus, especially the portable apparatus, such as PDA and mobile phones.

5. The ability to develop over time to adapt timely to the emerging demand in the market.

Beijing InfoQuick SinoVoice Speech Technology Corp. (SinoVoice) is a High-Tech enterprise expertizes in the TTS and ASR areas. It has developed its mature high-tech voice products and has applied them on the Chinese governmence system, banking system, transportation system and so on. It wins the bid of providing the multilingual speech synthesis products to the 2008 Olympics. With the domestic market share of 50% and the partnership with the biggest global speech solution provider -- Nuance, SinoVoice concentrates on further research and development of voice technology, on the widespread applications of the technology and on its further integration with other apparatus and techniques. With the deep understanding of Chinese language, SinoVoice will work hard on other languages and try to provide all-round language solutions for the clients.