It’s Masters Week and if there is anything I enjoy about golf, it’s taking a nice reflective walk.We’ve been talking a lot about our Voice API lately here on the TeleBlog. We’ve given specific use cases, talked about the excellent quality, reliability and the competitive price, but what we haven’t done is list all the great features in one place! That ends today. Let’s take a leisurely stroll through Telesign’s Voice API, with some real world examples on how it can benefit your business.
Make, Receive and Control Calls
The most basic but potentially most important backbone of the Telesign Voice API is the ability to programmatically control, make, receive manage and route calls all over the world. 230 countries in fact! That is 19 countries more than are eligible for the FIFA World Cup, 24 countries more than are eligible for the Olympics and 35 countries more than are recognized by the United Nations. If you need to reach someone via a phone call, we can probably do it!
Connect Two Parties
Do you have a mobile application that aims to open up a two way voice call between two parties? We can do that for you. Despite what the youth of America may say, there is still value in hearing another person’s voice.
Lease Phone Numbers and Set Caller ID
With the Telesign Voice API you can buy and use phone numbers across over 120 countries to receive inbound calls. Furthermore, you can set a Caller ID to something your end user will recognize for an outbound call. Let’s say you operate in Great Britain, but are targeting folks on the west side of Los Angeles. Ya, we can get you that 310.
Text-to-Speech With Broad Language Support
Unfortunately I only speak one language, our Voice API speaks 26! Using Telesign’s Voice API business owners can convert text to speech (TTS) into a voicebased message. For international corporations reaching out to a multitude of regions, use our API’s advanced linguistic talent to provide a localized customer experience.
Traffic Monitoring
Are you worried about International Revenue Share Fraud (IRSF) Attacks? You should be, it’s a multi billion dollar industry and accounts for roughly 20% of all telecom fraud. Fortunately, Telesign Voice includes traffic monitoring, so you don’t need to worry about checking for attacks on weekends and nights. We’ll do it for you. Any irregularities or abnormalities in traffic will raise a red flag.
Anonymize Phone Calls
Similar to connecting two parties but with the added benefit of anonymity! Sometimes a platform will want to connect two parties while maintaining a layer of privacy, think ride share or home rentals. Not only does number masking improve user safety it also keeps them on platform to keep future revenue streams available. For more on the benefits of anonymizing phone calls read this post. When Telesign attended TADHack Orlando, a start-up company named CALLNECTION implemented our 2-Way Anonymous Voice Calling as part of a dating platform. What will you use it for?
Collect Digits (DTMF Tones)
Another fun feature of the Telesign Voice API is the ability to collect information without the need of humans (or human error!) Do you need to collect a birthdate, a credit card number or even a human response to a prompt (press 1 to…) Simple! When the digit collection is completed, an event with the results will be posted to the callback URL.
Deliver secure, voice-based onetime passcodes (OTPs)
You probably know that Telesign cut its teeth on OTPs and 2FA. While you may immediately think of OTPs as an SMS-based initiative, you can do the same thing with a voice call. There are a variety of reasons a person may prefer a voice OTP to an SMS. I personally find it difficult to look at a number on one screen and type it onto another device. Your mileage may vary, but why not offer the choice?
Stream Audio
My favorite feature on our Voice API is the ability to stream audio. To quote a popular internet meme…Tired: An SMS that tells you your favorite artist is coming to town.Wired: A voice call with music playing and a recording of an artist telling you when they are coming to town. This is a really cool option to do event marketing. As I mentioned in the intro, The Masters is happening right now, why not record Jim Nantz and his soothing voice and blast out to customers to promote the event and the broadcast. We use Amazon Polly, so in addition to audio files, call scripts or branded messages you can leverage TTS for lifelike voices in a variety of languages.
Advanced Phone Number Cleansing
Let’s be honest, sometimes we fat finger a key or just screw up when we’re typing information in. It’s the human element. Our advanced phone number cleansing properly formats phone number entered by end-user for more reliable and secure call delivery, which improves deliverability by more than 10% in most markets.
Build Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Flows
This is probably the most useful portion of our Voice platform, you can build entire IVR flows with DTMF key prompts to send callers through pre-selected call flows. This reduces support costs, call transfers and agent handling times by up to 80%. This can be used in conjunction with COD as well as to power your entire internal support structure.An example of a flow would be “Thank you for calling TeleBlog Inc. how can we route your call? Press 1 to speak with customer service, Press 2 to speak to sales or press 3* to listen to a recording of Prince’s halftime performance from Super Bowl XLI.”*There is no business reason for option 3, but Prince is just cool.
Survey After Call
One of the most important ways to engage end users is through customer feedback. A very basic way to do this is to ask them how they feel. Why not send an automated voice survey to a customer after an interaction?”Press 1 if you enjoyed this blog.” (Or something along those lines)Well there you have it friends. The 12 coolest features of the Telesign Voice API. What is so exciting though, is how you combine them all to do interesting things. The limit is that of your imagination. Thanks for coming on a journey with me through our newest API. Please enjoy the the Masters coverage this weekend and go Tiger! To learn more about Telesign Voice API click here.
