Chronopost International chooses Acapela to speech enable their new voice portal, fully based on speech technologies.

Chronopost International, European specialist in express transport and delivery throughout the world, reinforces its customer information services using Acapela Sayso™ text to speech. Chronopost International's Voice portal offers a range of services allowing its customers to track and accurately follow the itinerary of the many 200,000 packages and documents that Chronopost International ship each day in 220 different countries. The service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

By banking on speech technologies instead of pre-recorded speech and touchtone (DTMF) and by creating a gateway between the website content and the voice portal, Chronopost International have considerably enhanced their customer information service.

Since January this year, Chronopost International has been successfully capitalising on their web tracking service that they are now able to offer to their customers over the telephone with a fully voice-enabled interface. "Including integration and testing, the investment was quite reasonable and took no more than 100 man-days. As a result, we have a strong value-added service for our customers".
The first version of the automatic package tracking telephone service had required a large investment in time and was amortised in 6 months. This time, Chronopost International expects Return On Investment to be even shorter.

Chronopost International chose the Acapela Sayso™ Text to speech for its capability to convey any written information in a particularly natural and intelligible voice. The choice of using Acapela Sayso™ as the unique voice through all the voice messages and information allows optimised speech quality and comfort. The user no longer suffers from break offs between pre-recorded messages and messages read in real time by text to speech. Access to information is of high quality and fluidity, for an improved image of the service.

By deploying Acapela Sayso™ in such a 'visible' service, Chronopost confirms the success of the Sayso technology that has already been deployed in several mass-market services such as the telephone access to the latest news from AFP, a well-known French News Agency and France's leading financial newspaper : Les Echos.

Chronopost International currently has 200 agencies in 13 countries. With a consolidated turnover in 2001 of 689 million euros, the group carried in the same year over 65 million envelopes and packages.