EasyDial

Alexa - Ask EasyDial to give DT a ring about my broadband...

Inspiration

Calling customer support is painful, you have to navigate a menu then wait on hold for 30mins... When all you want to do is go live your life without your phone to your ear!

What it does

We created an Alexa Skill that calls a company's customer service team on your behalf. It then chooses the correct menu option, waits on hold until finally you reach a human customer service agent and at that point forwards the call onto you.

How we built it

Alexa connects to a AWS Lambda function, this makes a request to a Flask server. This then uses Twillio to create a conference call, adding the company and our AI agent. The agent then selects the appropriate option for the users query with IBM Watson's Speech to Text and Alchemy Language tools. When a customer representative answers, the user is then connected!

The way we do it with Watson is to take Taxonomy, Sentiment and Keywords, which are then analysed and weighted to determine the best matching response.

Challenges we ran into

Phone calls have a surprisingly low sampling rate, this meant Watson had a hard time with the classification
Conference Calls with Twilio have a few nuances!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All of it coming together! Was awesome to use three great technologies, really feels like the future

What we learned

The Twillio API is pretty good!
IBM Watson struggles to classify sentences with the word 'query'!
We know way more about the ins and outs of Alexa
There is no company that will get you through to a person on a Sunday in less than 60 seconds!
It is all to easy for someone to ask Alexa to buy you a PS4 for next day delivery...