Cyber call centre ‘staff’ to end need of being on hold (From The Northern Echo)

Cyber call centre ‘staff’ to end need of being on hold

8:20am Friday 16th May 2008

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COMPUTERISED agents called Aida could start answering phones at call centres across the world within a year, if a North- East business goes to plan.

Artingence, an artificial intelligence company, is developing computerised call centre agents that sound like humans.

Called AIDA (Artificially Intelligent Directed Agent), they will answer the phone and deal with callers.

The company, which has become the latest tenant of the Bioscience centre at the Centre for Life, in Newcastle, believes its technology will remove the need for callers to be put on hold.

The company said it will also help call centre companies with recruitment problems.

Sales director Adam Rogers said the technology may be ready within a year.

He said: "We have a team working at the Centre for Life to integrate four software packages that already exist, voice synthesis, voice recognition, artificial intelligence and the call centre software.

"Those software packages exist, but no other company has brought them together in this way.

"What the product will do is all the things a human agent is able to do in an outsourced job in India for example or a minimum wage job in the UK.

"We want to see this being used in every call centre in the world."

He explained how the system will work.

He said: "The software that already exists today allows us to integrate a voice synthesiser. You would not know you were talking to a computer.

"You do not have to press a number on the keypad or answer yes or no.

"The voice synthesiser we are using is so far advanced you could literally call up and roll out a sentence and the software package could interpret it in order to understand your request."

People would also have the option to speak to a human voice at any point that they wanted.

Mr Rogers said: "There will be human managers monitoring calls at all times and, if they feel the need to intervene, they can do as can the client."

Mr Rogers said AIDA would not lead to major job losses at call centres in the UK.

The company said the system would help because of the high turnover of staff in the industry.

He said: "Absolutely not - if that was the case, it would be jobs that are considered bottom of the barrel for which they appoint agency workers on a week-to week-basis.

"We want to create permanent, full-time jobs at a higher level - in a managerial role.

"It will give clients the chance to bring back outsourced work from abroad to create jobs in the UK."

Mr Rogers hopes the next few months will see a prototype AIDA introduced and featured in science magazines before they go into full production.

Artingence expects to create a significant number of jobs in software design, development and support in the North-East.

The company was founded in January this year by Newcastle born Karl Dorner, who from 1993 helped to build the European arm of Convergys - the largest call centre outsourcing operation in the world.

The Centre for Life's chief executive, Linda Conlon, said: "At the Centre for Life, it's one of our objectives to support sciencebased businesses like Artingence and to help them become established.

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