Just two days ago I heard some rather disturbing news out of the Cincinnati area. Regional phone carrier Cincinnati Bell, working with OneCommand, is using technology to help bring holiday joy to thousands of children in the Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana tri-state area, unfortunately, it’s not speech technology that’s involved, and that’s a huge opportunity missed for an industry that could use some holiday cheer.
OneCommand is powering Cincinnati Bell’s popular and free Santa Calls program. The program makes it easy for residents to delight a child with a scheduled, personalized call from Santa. Santa Calls is easy to use: community members can go to Cincinnati Bell’s Web site or Facebook page from their computer or or smartphone, personalize the call by selecting from one of four provided messages, select the child’s name from a drop-down menu, and then schedule the date and time for delivery. All calls are then delivered by OneCommand using Santa’s voice. For any phone equipped with caller ID, the call will appear to come directly from the North Pole.
“There is no more rewarding use of our technology than helping Cincinnati Bell bring the magic of Santa’s voice, complete with North Pole updates, directly to boys and girls in OneCommand’s hometown,” OneCommand CEO Al Babbington said in a statement.
Though all of this sounds like a golden opportunity for text-to-speech, OneCommand uses none. Instead, all the messages are pre-recorded, and even the names are pre-recorded. Once the parent selects the name and the message from the drop-down menus, technology pairs the two to craft a single message.
Sadly, if the child’s name is not one of the dozens that appear in the menu, the child is out of luck. The message gets delivered without that piece of personalization.
Lindsay Leugers, vice president of marketing at OneCommand, said the company just couldn’t find a quality TTS program that didn’t sound robotic and unnatural. I can’t say how hard the company looked, which vendors it considered, or how it reached that conclusion, but I can say that there should be a vendor out there with a product that’s good enough. If that’s truly not the case, shame on us as an industry, and we deserve to get coal in our collective stockings this year. But I have to believe in my heart of hearts that someone could provide an adequate TTS engine to suit this use. TTS today is very good. And it’s getting better all the time.
So just how big of a lost opportunity is this? In the five years since the program started, OneCommand has delivered more than 350,000 personalized calls from Santa on behalf of Cincinnati Bell. The Santa Calls program is one of Cincinnati Bell’s most successful and popular community outreach programs. It’s time for TTS to get in on the action.
It’s definitely a lost opportunity. Back in 2003, Nu Echo worked on such a system (called Talk-to-Santa). TTS was already good enough at that time and the application was a great success. The voice was maybe a bit robotic sometimes, but I guess young kids didn’t really notice. The application even used speech recognition with some very effective error recovery strategies.
Dominique