NAB to use customised voice in its call centres

NAB is one of the first users worldwide of a new capability in Amazon’s Polly text-to-speech service that lets it customise the voice used to read information to customers that call into its contact centre.

iTnews revealed in December last year that the bank is re-platforming its contact centres on Amazon Connect, a hosted service based on one Amazon uses for its own retail operations.

Among other things, Connect is able to recognise self-service opportunities in a conversation and inject them directly into the interaction.

The bank said last year that it is also customising Connect for its own purposes, and that it would “establish a roadmap and deliver [new] components” on the platform once it was bedded down.

That now appears to be the case, with NAB revealing that it is using ‘brand voice’, a new feature in Amazon’s Polly text-to-speech service where a “team of AI research scientists and linguists ... build an exclusive, high-quality, neural text-to-speech (NTTS) voice that represents [a] brand’s persona.”

“We are looking to Amazon Connect to help us improve the experience customers have when they contact our call centres,” NAB’s general manager of digital and assisted channels Laurent Desegur said in a statement. 

“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.”

Desegur suggested the custom voice would be gradually rolled out.

He gave no indication of the roadmap or initial use cases, though it is likely to be what customers hear when they interact with a self-service component within a support call.

AWS said brand voice “opens up a breadth of opportunities to create custom voices with a persona or speaking style that your company and brand identify with.”