Auto dialer detection (Part II): live human pickup vs answering machine

Continue from Part I of this article…

Special Situation Handling

The previous post shows that to achieve 100% accuracy is not possible using today’s technology. Voicent has spent a great amount of our R&D time on developing a better algorithm. Our system should work well for most cases.

In order to make the system more responsive to human pickup, something has to give. And this something is the accuracy for answering machine detection. If you care more about live human pickup and you can tolerate more mistakes for answering machine, then you can make the algorithm more responsive to humans.

Make it most responsive for live human pickup

On an extreme case, you can instruct the system not to do any answering machine vs. human analysis. Whenever the system hears a voice, it can start playing the message right away. Of cause, the system still needs some short time to recognize the human voice, filtering out the background noises, etc. The drawback is of this approach is that all answering machines will be treated as humans. The message will be played immediately after an answering machine answers the call. There will be no message, or only partial message, left on answering machines.

To set this option, please select Setup > Options… from the gateway main menu, then choose the Detection tab. Move the sliding control bar to the position marked “Most aggressive”.

The biggest problem of this approach is that no answering machine will be recognized. For general usage, this setting is not recommended.

Make it more aggressive more human pickup

The default setting is the balanced approach for humans vs. answering machines. This is the default setting and it is recommended for general usage. The system will try to make a prediction as soon as possible.

You can make the system to be more aggressive on human pickup without totally losing the ability of answering machine detection. You can set it prediction to be “more aggressive” on humans. In this setting, the system will try to make a prediction as soon as the audio is likely to be humans. But there will be more mistakes for answering machines.