A client developer of ours made the following comment in an email about a product gap:  “No ‘Confirm If-Necessary’ ability.  Most speech offerings allow apps to confirm if the confidence level comes back in a middle zone between rejecting and accepting the utterance.  For [Client A], we either have to set a page to confirm always, or risk false accepts, which will eventually cause a concern.”The truth of the matter is we do have this ability, but it’s just buried within the application on our “Question Pages”!  Which lead inevitably and inexorably to an educational feature series that I will be forming around enabling our users to “Put the Caller First”.

Angel applications have an ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) setting called confidence level set to .45 (or 45%) which means that the application assigns a confidence level to everything a caller says to it and accepts responses that it is at least 45% confident it knows what you have said.

Imagine if you are in a noisy room, and someone responds to a question that you ask and you are not sure you heard them correctly – you would subconsciously assign a confidence level to what you heard, and may ask them to repeat what they said.   However instead of asking them to repeat what they said, you may just say, “I heard you say [response], is that right?” building confidence in them that you are actively listening.

Angel has the ability to do this through the use of adjusting the confidence level, turning on confirmation, and finally adjusting the confidence threshold. This is by default set at 1 when you turn on confirmation making everything confirmed regardless of how confident you are in the response.

Below is a simple guide on how to do this:

In this example we have an app where getting the response right is important but not 100% critical, and quality of the experience by speed is equally important.  If we are 75%+ confident in the response we just accept it and move on.  We only reject the response when we are less than 25% confident, forcing them to a no-match error.  Finally between 25-75% confidence, we politely let them know what we think they asked for, and ask them to confirm or deny that.  Here we are “Putting the Caller First”.

In the future we will be exploring ways to capture confidence levels into variables to enable creative things (i.e. cool things with logic pages, improved customer analysis and tuning through enterprise reporting, etc).