NAB Unveils Computer Generated ‘Brand Voice’ For Contact Centres
National Australia Bank now has a “brand voice”, a unique, lifelike sounding automated speech capability for its contact centres powered by cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services.
The NAB voice, which can read out text in a natural way, sounds like a male Australian which, the bank says, is consistent with its brand and what a NAB customer would expect when they call the bank.
The voice runs on AWS’s Amazon Polly service and will be used in NAB’s contact centres. The bank is currently migrating its contact centre technology to Amazon’s cloud solution, Connect.
“We’re looking to Amazon Connect to help us improve the experience customers have when they contact our call centers,” said Laurent De Segur, NAB’s general manager of digital and assisted channels.
“For that reason, it was also important that the voice we created using Amazon Polly Brand Voice felt both uniquely NAB and consistent with our position and what our customers expect when they call us.”
KFC Canada also launched its brand voice today, an automated Colonel Sanders sounding voice to be built into Amazon Alexa services which allows users to order food through the Amazon voice assistant.
Under The Hood
Amazon Polly, is an AWS service that converts text into lifelike speech. It launched in 2016 but today is the first reveal of the new “brand voice” function. Brands can work with Amazon’s artificial intelligence scientists to build customised “personas” based on neutral text to speech technology and generative AI.
AWS says a deep learning model allows Polly voices to “acquire intonation patterns from natural speech data, and reproduce utterances” in a similar voice and tone.
Phillip Zammit, AWS’s head of cognitive CX for APAC says Australian brands want to deliver personalised experiences that build brand advocacy and a brand voice can help do that.
“Emerging technology like neural text-to-speech leverages machine learning tools to turn customer interactions such as contact center calls or virtual assistants into engaging and human-like experiences designed to reflect a brand’s persona.”
source which50
Industry: Unified Communications
