OrderCatcher has been featured in ASRNews.com April 2009 magazine. ASRNews said that we have the VUI right at a lower cost for the customer in the retail industry.  Read the Article below:

The speech industry has historically had a completely incorrect approach to voice user interface (VUI) design.  Essentially, it is the VUI designer “inventing” the VUI from a combination of linguistic knowledge, rumours, customer likes/dislikes, hear-say and superstition.  A very expensive process that yields poor results.  You just need to call a couple of existing IVRs to see this.

What OrderCatcher is doing with VUI design is emulating a high-quality agent.  Say it just like a real agent would say it.  A faithful and precise replication of how a human agent would perform.  This should not be confused with the persona nonsense that was promoted by a number of speech vendors a few years ago.   These were poorly done attempts to act like a unique personality that still did not function like a real agent would.

The basic reason that the OrderCatcher approach works is that the agents have spent a lot of effort in figuring out what to say (and how to say it) to optimize the results that they are obtaining.  They want callers to cooperate with them and they have figured out what to say and how to say it, in order to make this happen.   Callers are encountering what they expected and in turn respond in a predictable fashion.

With the OrderCatcher approach, you also now have an implementation process that is straightforward and predictable.  No more witchcraft and guessing.  No VUIDs debating in an endless loop and never agreeing on very much.  Instead you listen to recordings of the calls and faithfully replicate what the agent is saying and how the agent is saying it.  Actually getting the agent from the recording to speak and prompts and using the voice of the agent is a pretty effective approach for creating the actual script prompts.

The result of using the OrderCatcher VUI implementation approach is that the implementation gets done at a much lower cost and, most importantly, the caller experience is greatly improved.  Self-service utilization goes up.  Everyone wins.  Even the VUI designers win since they can get on with their lives and start doing something more useful.

For now, OrderCatcher is focused on the retail transaction area which is exemplified by the fast food segment.  In a recent trial with a nationwide pizza chain, OrderCatcher handled 40% of the transactions.