VoiceCon 2010: Calabrio offers speech analytics with Calabrio One

Calabrio announced the general availability of Calabrio One. The company’s newest workforce optimization solution combines Calabrio’s latest call monitoring, call recording and quality assurance solutions with its performance management reporting. The company also added speech analytics with Calabrio One.

Calabrio, Inc. is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota and supplies contact centers with workforce optimization and workforce management solutions. Its applications are 100% browser-based, simplifying maintenance and virtualization of the contact centers, and operate on standard server and desktop hardware. The company’s workforce optimization solution and workforce management solution each have centralized administration interfaces and Calabrio has begun to combine the separate interfaces into a single administration interface. While users can use Calabrio’s solutions with most of the leading contact center solutions, it is most closely integrated with Cisco’s Unified Contact Center and Unified Contact Center Express.

The addition of speech analytics in Calabrio One moves the solution into parity with leading quality assurance solutions, such as those offered by Verint and Aspect. Calabrio’s employs phonetics-based speech analytics that uses the basic sounds used to make speech to search call recordings. This is different from other speech analytics solutions that use speech-to-text technology to translate the sounds into written words then searches the text for specific words or phrases. Phonetics allows users to more easily set up searches and localize the search to regional languages and dialects than word spotting. However, phonetics is less accurate than word or phrase spotting.

Users create a library of sounds by running an indexing process against stored call recordings. However, to create the index the recordings must be unencrypted which may pose problems for companies that are PCI-DSS compliant or working for compliance. The solution uses the index to search new recording and indicates which recording contain the desired words or phrases. Call recordings have to be unencrypted to be searched.

Calabrio also added network recording architecture into Calabrio One. This expanded call and screen-recording system allows users to use Calabrio’s quality management solution in a distributed contact center environment. Calabrio now offers three recording configurations, desktop-based, service-based and network-based which supplies users with flexibility and enables Calabrio to compete in a wide range of contact center configurations.

Calabrio’s solutions are solid and affordable, especially when used in collaboration with Cisco’s contact center and communication products. The central administration helps users control operating costs by decreasing learning curves. While the new speech analytics solution is the least accurate of the speech topologies, it is also the least complicated to set up and modify, allowing users to begin searching recording quickly and increasing ROI. Calabrio one is currently available and interested parties should speak with a Calabrio reseller.