In Boston, we tell people to “Pahk yah cah in Havahd Yahd.” Visitors to our city may find the local accent hard to understand. But when we call one of our many outstanding Boston-area hospitals, surely those front door speech recognition systems should be able to understand us, right? Is that a reasonable expectation?
Automatic speech recognition systems (ASRs) are only as successful as what they’re trained to understand. The number of times any proper name appears in speech is far, far less than all the other words in Standard American English. This lack of training data causes problems for the healthcare industry, where 70% of calls contain a name. Doctor names, other provider names, patient names, prescription names, etc. Regional accents further complicate recognition.
Hospitals and clinics are frustrating healthcare consumers when speech recognition systems can’t understand what’s being said. In addition, operators and agents remain overwhelmed with high call volumes. But will AI ever be able to keep up?
At Parlance, our conversational AI solutions help solve this issue for health systems better than any of our competitors. Parlance is THE BEST at named entity recognition! Our proprietary tools and applications surround the technology to improve recognition at hundreds of hospitals and clinics across the nation, while generating the best ROI. With Parlance, your callers will embrace the ease of navigating and your agents will appreciate the deflection of repetitive tasks that take up so much of their time today.
Parlance is an established SaaS company serving more hospitals and clinics than any other conversational AI solution. We guarantee performance and generate the very best ROI for health systems. Our unrivaled expertise and managed service delivery assures proven results with less effort from your team.
Parlance sets up a comprehensive contact directory that continuously pulls data from enterprise repositories including, EHR, HR, CRM, credentialing, telephony, and other enterprise systems. Our proprietary applications then augment that data by automatically assigning common alternate ways of referring to the people and places in the organization. Our solution generates likely pronunciations for name content and then refines those phonetic pronunciations to ensure more accurate recognition.
The Parlance solution is continuously learning and adapting to each health system and its callers – including their accents. Parlance APIs import, while our apps and tools scrub and publish, ensuring accurate, up-to-date information. Parlance processes the contact directory, determines what names might be acoustically ambiguous, then automatically puts “tiebreakers” in place. Our language models capture spoken language and are then trained with that directory content and pronunciation data. We use reverse acoustic search and machine learning to build models that can infer likely pronunciation information, further improving system understanding and the responsiveness of our conversational AI. In order to ensure continued excellent performance over time, Parlance implements periodic human review to identify frequently misrecognized pronunciations and optimize models.
Implementing conversational AI and generative IVR (interactive voice response) solutions that can better understand regional accents requires both experience and adaptability. Parlance proprietary applications and time-tested tools have evolved through many generations of speech technology. We know what it takes to meet callers where they are, rather than at the limits of a given ASR engine’s capability. The Parlance solution ensures frictionless experiences for healthcare consumers, so they can quickly access the people, departments, and resources they need.
Since 1996, Parlance has been committed to the idea that callers deserve friction-free, voice-driven access to the right resources inside large enterprises. Our continuous innovation is driven by this mission. Today’s technology offers us the opportunity to elevate the calling experience with conversational AI. Whether you say “Doctor Kumar” or “Doctah Kumah” Parlance connects you to where you want to go.
