Peter,<br><br>Thanks for the insights. I just tried out Twilio's Speech to Text API and played the same message as Yext Demo. It worked out pretty well so I am very impressed. It's likely that Twilio uses SpinVox in the back-end anyway.. By the way, I think Yext records the call and sends the recorded file for transcription. This saves the hassle of mixing and transcribing two different audio files.<br>
<br>Yes, Yext has a fairly impressive solution indeed and I could think of so many applications that are vertical specific (e.g. Automotive). I could imagine Yext building a lot of library relevant to each category (e.g. Doctor, Mechanic, Finance etc) and then doing a close/guess association of the returned text to white/blacklist certain terms and then splitting them into different sub-categories (e.g. Year built, Make/Model etc). This is hard work (hence barrier to entry) and they seem to have raised $17M in recent round in addition to running a (self asserted) $20M and growing business. Hard to play the catch up game...<br>
<br>Another interesting fact is that Yext solution would improve with time much like wine. Given the call/customer flow and lack of competition, Yext could continue to improve the keyword filtering and categorizing over time creating a fairly accurate solution.<br>
<br>Ritesh<br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Peter Beckman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:beckman@angryox.com">beckman@angryox.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">On Wed, 30 Sep 2009, Ritesh A wrote:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Folks,<br>
<br>
Does anyone have a clue on how Yext transcribes the calls (almost) on the<br>
fly?<br>
I am pretty sure they are using asterisk at the heart and perhaps using some<br>
neat APIs for call transcription.<br>
If you are know of any outfit there that provides similar APIs, please ping<br>
me...<br>
<br>
If anyone is interested in learning more about Yext, here is the video demo<br>
of their interesting demo at TC50<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2163590" target="_blank">http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2163590</a><br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
I am extremely impressed with Yext. Thanks for the link and your post!<br>
<br>
Here's my take on how they do it.<br>
<br>
* recording both ends of the call separately (Asterisk can do this)<br>
* pass both audio files to a voice processing API (SpinVox)<br>
* integrate the relating text into a conversation flow (very cool, not<br>
sure how, depends on the API)<br>
* parse resulting text into keywords matching categories (maybe scoring<br>
them somehow), then if the score is high enough, using a higher level<br>
matching (if a year (2007), make (Porche) and model (911) are mentioned,<br>
put them together in the right order and put it in the inbox,<br>
searchable).<br>
<br>
Both the merging of the two sides of conversation and The keyword matching<br>
is where they really did some cool stuff. While I can think of how they<br>
did it in theory, it probably took a lot of work to pull that off.<br>
"Automotive" is likely a set of related keywords, and then another set of<br>
keyword combinations. One of the combos combine the matches on keywords<br>
found, then matches those to "[year] [make] [model]" as a relevant<br>
keyphrase if Automotive is selected.<br>
<br>
Beckman<br>
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