Seldom does a crime provoke an organisation to create a technology that strives to reduce that crime. The recent brutal murders of personnel working in the BPO industry left everyone aghast, but while the rest of the world was focused on the who, when, and why, Lattice Bridge began looking for a solution using technology. Webtra is its tech answer to a social challenge.

Lattice Bridge is a pioneer in the speech technology space, and focuses on empowering people to communicate with information systems using voice commands. Its cutting-edge technologies and tools provide high-value, low-cost information solutions in record time. But its latest innovation, called Webtra, is taking the BPO industry by storm. The physical assaults and brutal murders of two female call-centre employees in Pune and Bengaluru, allegedly by the driver of the cab they were travelling in, motivated the team at Lattice to design this system.

Webtra, a revolutionary technology

Webtra ('Web,' as in website and 'tra' as in tracking) is a Web-based logistics management and multi-mode contextual messaging system designed to provide extended traveller care during transit. The main aim of Webtra, as a collaborative security system, is to facilitate a virtually live communication environment between the employer and the employees while they commute. Webtra blends the power of two fast-growing technologies' speech recognition and mobile communication.

"A person in crisis often cannot communicate! This is the fundamental basis of the system that we have designed," says S.S. Rajan, chief sales and strategy officer (CSSO), Lattice Bridge. The absence of a scheduled communication is the sign of something being wrong. Tracking is done by automated outbound calls from the Webtra Xtend Server to every staff member travelling by cab, using a mobile phone. The elaborate back-end system compares call results with what is supposed to be normal. Deviations trigger alerts at various levels in the central monitoring system, the company's transport desk, and on phones of the concerned stakeholder. More than thirty scenarios (and their permutations) have been factored in, and the system alerts the company, families, police control rooms, hospitals etc, as required by the definition of the crisis.

Webtra is the only application of its kind in India. The most attractive feature is that it is independent of human action or intervention until an alarm is raised. The monitoring system functions on the principle of 'management by exception', or 'no news is good news', there is no cause for alarm if no alert is received. Also, a 'non-event' (something that is expected to happen, but does not happen, such as the receipt of an SMS from the employee) sets off an alert.

Hurdles surmounted

One big challenge that the team faced was gaining an understanding of the complexities of the BPO industry's ways of working. "While we had heard about companies with two, three or even four shifts, this industry has companies with as many as 96 shifts. Also, these dynamic timings keep changing to align with the functioning hours of clients abroad. Often, there are no ways of defining exact shift end-timings for an individual, on a particular day. There are several people on flexi-timings too. Each company follows a different method of employee rostering, scheduling and cab allocation. Creating something within the framework of a single standard would not work. The biggest challenge we faced was creating 'customisable standardisation'," reveals Rajan.

It took the team two years, and discussions with logistics experts from more than 60 companies to just understand the complexities of the system within which this solution had to function. Then, there were other issues of creating a network-agnostic solution, a communication system that would work on any mobile or land phone network. (See the box for more information on how the solution works.)

Lattice Bridge

Started in 2002, Lattice Bridge is a group company of TeNeT. Lattice Bridge and TeNeT have jointly developed speech technology products for the Indian and global markets. It is headquartered at Chennai and has offices/representatives in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, UAE and South Africa.

Lattice Bridge has several firsts to its credit. It has successfully launched the world's first Tamil speech recognition system in the telephony environment. It is also behind the first-ever large-scale public deployment of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) application for the Indian Railways.

"Today our technology can deliver any digital content other than pictures or video on a normal landline or mobile phone. India is a country with 196.7 million telecom connections and only 3 million broadband connections. Due to socio-economic, cultural, educational, financial and linguistic barriers, almost 70 to 80 per cent of the population will most probably not have access to the Internet. Speech recognition technology becomes the easiest, most cost-effective and highly scalable solution to deliver information," reports Mohan Ram, founder and managing director, Lattice Bridge.

Lattice Bridge targets its automatic speech recognition-based solutions to multiple domains and verticals. It has enabled the successful migration of conventional touch-one, dual-tone multi-frequency-based contact centres to ASR and has acquired winning projects from the banking, telecom, travel, logistics and utility sectors.

Some of the other innovative solutions provided by Lattice Bridge are:

- Sure Identity: aids in speaker identification, which provides security to personalised information.

- Candidate Relationship Management: an automated recruitment and follow-up system, which provides relief to BPOs and IT companies that face the regular problem of attrition and subsequent recruitment.

- ACD: enables call distribution by name or department. Callers need not know or memorise extension numbers.

- eVASS: automates HR management, which enables employees to access their details and apply for leave and other facilities.