On 17th July 2006, FIDELIA Assistance, a company specialised in creating and managing assistance services, launched a particularly innovative automobile assistance telephone service which is voice activated, and being used at the GMF Insurance Company. Over and above the classic switchboard functions, this is the only service in the field of insurance which makes it possible to identify and qualify a car insurance policy holder through recognition of their registration plate.
It is 10pm, you have broken down on the motorway, and you do not have your breakdown assistance documents with you! What do you do? It is simple, from now on: all GMF policy holders have to do is call, pronounce their registration plate number and they will be directly connected to Fidelia’s Assistance service! This represents a significant advantage in situations where a policy holder, who is always in a hurry or a panic, doesn’t necessarily have his insurance contract number with him!
This service has existed since 2002 between the hours of 7am and 11pm. It was previously powered by DTMF technology. Today, the same functions are still available; it has simply been upgraded to use Speech recognition and be accessible 24/7!
According to Valerie Gandet, responsible for this project:
"Innovation is a constructive value and part of Fidelia Assistance’s image in the market. With speech recognition, we wanted to test a technology which is entirely new in our sector. Speech is the most natural solution and easier to use than the telephone touch pad. It seems to us to be most fitting to use in situations which are inevitably somewhat stressful. Since it is more direct, it also helps our customers to gain precious time. Finally, and above all, automating the identification and qualification process allows our assistance operators to concentrate on their real job: counselling and assistance."
The service, developed by NextiraOne, is based on the CCIVR ALCATEL 4625 platform and telisma’s speech recognition technology teliSpeech 1.2.
Besides the classic challenges related to environments which are often very noisy or whose users have various regional accents, when setting up the service, the problem of recognising alpha-numerical sequences also had to be taken into account. Many letters of the alphabet are pronounced with a small number of individual sounds, and very little surrounding context, with the result that many sound alike, for example T and D. This poses special challenges for speech recognition.
Furthermore, people do not necessarily spell their registration number in the same way; each person groups the letters and numbers in their own way… After setting up the system, the tuning phase in particular made it possible to take into account the variety of unusual ways users can spell letters over the telephone.
The service
