AWS brings tailored personas to Amazon Polly with Brand Voice
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced Brand Voice as the latest feature to the company's Amazon Polly service, which it touts will enable companies to use neural text-to-speech technology to tailor voice to suit their brand's persona.
"In the crowded digital space where voice is becoming very important as part of a customer's brand experience, we're now giving customers an opportunity to create a very unique, local identity to represent some of the products and services," AWS head of solution architecture for Australia and New Zealand Peter Stanski told ZDNet.
As part of the launch, AWS has announced National Australia Bank (NAB) as one of the first customers globally to adopt the new feature.
Stanski explained that NAB has used Brand Voice to create a "hand-crafted persona", which will be rolled out across its call centres nationally.
"They get about 9 million calls annually, so what they were looking for was to have a much more robust and scalable call centre solution that can help customers get access to information and help across the entire NAB brand," he said.
According to NAB digital and assisted channels general manager Laurent De Segur, use of Brand Voice follows the bank's contact centre adoption of Amazon Connect.
"We are looking to Amazon Connect to help us improve the experience customers have when they contact our call centers. For that reason, it was also important that the voice we created using Amazon Polly Brand Voice felt both uniquely NAB and consistent with our position and what our customers expect when they call us," she said.
Previously, the bank's executive general manager of digital and innovation Jonathan Davey cited the importance of voice-activated assistance within banking.
"We fundamentally believe as an organisation the way we need to be able to provide services to customers is changing and we're in a unique position where we're fortunate enough to be able to work with some of the most interesting and innovative companies around the world," Davey told ZDNet at the time.
Updated 5 February 2020, 8:41AM (AEDT): NAB is one of the first global customers to adopt Brand Voice, which is currently being rolled out.
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