Multilingual travel information on time any time
Catching a last minute boat or plane may not after all be as risky as it sounds. A group of Spanish and Greek companies have come up with around-the-clock telephone and e-mail service that provides instant pre-recorded travel information in multiple languages. With the use of a Spoken Language Dialogue System (SLDS), E2M interprets questions and offers a wide-range of replies on any type of journey. Two multi-lingual converters, currently in Greek and Spanish are used. A flexible database interface accesses the contents of the two application databases. Thus, this interface is capable of accepting a query in a common format, retrieving a requested data or responding to a customer, irrespective of regional accents or grammatical mistakes. Almost like naturally talking to a real human being, the system can be further adjusted to contain additional languages via the introduction of new lexicons. Whilst the automated speech interface takes place, no human interaction is required, giving, in this way, human operators the time to answer more complex enquiries. Such supply of immediate responses via pre-recorded messages covers travel queries more directly and fast enough that even the most demanding callers would rather address the system than an actual human operator. Companies using the system such as Hellas Flying Dolphins and Fred Olsen, take up the opportunity to provide high quality services by reducing their costs in human resources. Soon after the introduction of the EM2 system in their daily client operations, their success was further marked by a considerable percentage growth in reservation calls, transactions and access by their customers. Both Hellas Flying Dolphins and Fred Olsen hope to optimise their call centre to accommodate a total of 50 000 calls a month over the summer season. Although originally conceived for the tourist sector, E2M could easily serve other sectors in need of instant, global, multilingual interactions with clients. This user-friendly multilingual voice portal will pave the way for a new series of interactive applications for e-commerce services.