Words leaping off the page

For anyone with reduced visual or cognitive capabilities, the paper bills falling on their doormat are not just financial chores, they are also a frustrating challenge of comprehension.

As around one in seven people in Britain have difficulty with, or are unable to read, printed communications, this means a lot of bills are completely inadequate when it comes to performing their core task of informing and aiding the customer.

Given its long history of trying to ensure all its customers can get the maximum benefit from communications and technology, this was an irresistible challenge for the inclusion team at BT.

As Karen Roper, inclusion professional at BT Retail, explains: "We have offered our bills in different formats for around 20 years, including a 'talking bill' service, but these always had limitations for the customer. We wanted to offer a more sophisticated service, so we developed the audio CD bill, an industry first."

This is the first time it has been possible for BT to include a bill in entirety in an advanced audio format, as well as delivering it in the same timescales as a standard bill. Users can hear all the typical phone bill charge and call details, as well as accessing price plan information, service options and payment details.

Each CD actually contains files in audio, MP3 and text format. This ensures the bill can be heard using a standard CD or DVD player, a computer, or via PC-based text-to-voice software.

Popular innovation

An extensive trial with sight impaired customers proved the audio CD was a popular innovation, as well as providing significant feedback and improvements.

Roper says the reaction has been very positive, particularly to the synthetic voice. She says: "Many of our test customers could not even tell that it wasn't a person recording their bill rather than a computerised version. Since the official launch the user numbers are increasing every month."

It was not a straightforward development, however. No existing software was capable of creating individually vocalised bills, so BT turned for assistance to MPH Group, a technology company providing specialist disability services.

Alan Matthews, managing director of MPH Group, explains why it was not an easy innovation: "This kind of product has never been done before. It was a massive challenge to meet the customer need, and it is often the most simplistic elements that prove the biggest problem."

For example, the brain automatically rearranges the information on an itemised bill to make it easy to comprehend, or read out loud. Standard text-to-voice software reading the information would not make sense, so it was necessary for MPH to create an artificially intelligent dictionary and special routines to enable the data to be interpreted and read with understandable phrasing.

He says: "This was harder to solve than we expected, but our software now creates each audio file automatically with the right phrasing, rather than having to read each out sequentially. We can reproduce an 11-page BT bill as an audio file in just three minutes."

The software uses a synthesised real voice rather than a robotic one and this was further enhanced to help the user, with local rather than just phonetic pronunciation of place names, for example. It is available in a number of languages, including Welsh.

He adds: "It meant a few extra grey hairs at MPH, but it has resulted in a fabulous product for BT, which fits very nicely into the company’s inclusion strategy. If it opens up information to people who previously had been denied it, then it has all been worthwhile."

www.mph-uk.com/
www.btplc.com/inclusion/
www.btplc.com/inclusion/Needhelp/Alternativemedia/index.htm