Bill Meisel is in the August 2007 Edition of Speech Strategy NewsProducts for small-to-medium companies in food service
Richard Grant, CTO, Ordercatcher LLC, was interviewed by Bill Meisel in late July. Richard has been involved in speech development since 1993. He wrote and designed the first hands-free business application “Voice Pilot.” Richard notes that he has written commercial applications on almost every speech engine made since the 90s.
Meisel: What is the strategic vision that led you to co-found OrderCatcher?
Grant: I always believed that there would be time when the cost of providing speech applications to the SMB market would come. With the introduction of the Microsoft Speech Server 04 with its robust telephony engine in 2004 the time was right to start at business focused on proving speech telephony applications to this market place. In early 2005, Craig Downs [OrderCatcher CEO] and I both became convinced that telephony could move from very expensive projects down to a much smaller cost and that the service industry—especially restaurants—would be a prime market.
What are the products that OrderCatcher offers?
In the food service industry we offer the following…
OrderCatcher Chinese application: OrderCatcher Pizza application:
This is a system for Pizza restaurants that will take orders and manage the delivery system. It is based on a conversational speech self-service technology. It contains all the special features of OrderCatcher Chinese, but applied to the requirements of a pizza take-out order. OrderCatcher Pizza is customizable, allowing for the daily specials to be added as well as multi-menu item choices for the customer. OrderCatcher Curbside application:
This application is used to take orders of items that are being sold by a casual dining restaurant. It contains all the special features of OrderCatcher Chinese, but applied to the requirements of a casual dining restaurant take-out order. What do you consider unique aspects of your offering? I think the easiest thing to separate our products from other providers is “Tcx,” which is a design formula that removes the subjective factor in dialog design. It allows a mathematical measurement of effectiveness of execution of the requirements. No judgment calls or committee studies, just a value that measures theusability of the system. The next factor is understanding the service industry and how these customers and users differ from the IVR crowd. Simply stated, the difference is those who need to use compared to those who choose to use (a kind of speech ZEN). The final differentiator is the different techniques and process that we use. (We have filled a few patent applications for our technology.) |
