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Perhaps I’m used to stupid voice prompts and dumb voicemail systems, but I was quite surprised this morning when calling Microsoft’s main phone line at (425) 882-8080 and was greeted by an automated system with a female voice asking me who I would like to speak to. I spoke the name, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the voice recognition realized just exactly who I wanted to speak to. After I finished my phone call, I wanted to find out just how good this recognition was.

Thus, being the little troublemaker I am, I looked up Microsoft’s list of executives and redialed the main line. Some of these names I wasn’t positive on the pronounciation, but I found that the system was roughly 80% successful in understanding who I wanted to speak with. As I don’t know too many folks at good ‘ol MS right now, I had to resort to this list. I couldn’t find any difficult Indian or Chinese names to butcher, but I did remember that Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov worked there. I totally botched his name, but the voice recognition came through and asked if I wanted to speak to him.

So I mucked around with the system a bit more and found the following:

When their line picks up, it asks, “Thank you for calling Microsoft. Who would you like to contact?” After you tell the system who you would like to speak to, it asks you, “Are you looking for (name)?” If you say yes, they connect you instantly to that person. If you say no, it prompts you for the name again, and asks “Are you looking for (name)?” If you say no again, it asks if you know their email address. If you say no again, then it asks you to spell their last name, then tries to find it from their directory. If the last name is too popular, then it finally transfers you to a live person operator (I assume, as I just hung up before that). At times, if your pronounciation is murky, they may give you an option between a few people (press 1 for x, press 2 for y).

I don’t know how long their system has been up, but it’s the first time I’ve used it. I’m curious who developed their operator system, or if they developed it in-house. Does anyone know? The amazing thing is how fast it responds to you. It’s not , then wait 5 seconds for response. You only need to wait about a second for one. Pretty impressive when you have 55,000 employees or so worldwide… And all the temp workers they hire, too…

Now, don’t go pranking on account of me. And don’t be expecting to get Bill Gates on the line.
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http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/default.asp