Aeriandi has unveiled its automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology – the latest addition to its Suite of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant voice services. After a successful roll out with a leading UK energy company, Aeriandi’s ASR technology is now widely available to all customers via its cloud-hosted secure payments platform.

Aeriandi’s ASR technology is designed to help its customers – typically contact centres – offer a PCI compliant payment option to callers who cannot use the telephone keypad. This could include sufferers of rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs) such as arthritis, for whom joint pain, particularly in the hands, is a serious problem. For this group tasks like using a manual phone keypad can be extremely painful, if not impossible.

Typically, contact centres use dual tone, multi frequency (DTMF) technology to enable callers to make secure payments over the phone. This involves manually entering credit card details using the telephone keypad. ASR technology extends this secure payment capability to callers who are unable to use this method.

ASR in practice

Aeriandi’s ASR solution is the only secure, voice-only payment method that maintains PCI DSS Compliance standards without diverting the caller away from the agent. When the caller speaks their payment details, Aeriandi’s ASR uses voice-to-text technology to capture, convert and verify the information before processing the payment. Cardholder data is then relayed to the Payment Service Provider (PSP) via Aeriandi’s secure private cloud, without the information entering the contact centre.

The call is only muted to the operator while the caller gives their details, but strict controls ensure the customer is immediately returned into contact if they take too long, or as soon as their payment details are accepted or denied. The technology ensures a good customer experience, streamlines the payment process and achieves PCI DSS compliance.

Matthew Bryars, CEO and Co-Founder at Aeriandi, says: “Our experience shows that between one and five per cent of people cannot use – or don’t wish to use – manual DTMF technology to make phone payments. Companies should not be disadvantaging disabled customers or customers that do not wish to use DTMF, but this has to be balanced with protecting their data and maintaining a secure card data process. ”