NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--HourOne, an end-to-end video creation platform powered by AI and photoreal presenters, announced today that ALICE® Receptionist, the visitor management technology by WinTech, LLC, has expanded their relationship to enable an instant offering in multiple languages, and to enhance the customer experience, regardless of language or market. Today’s news comes off the back of an earlier successful implementation of HourOne’s technology to automate COVID-19 related health and safety policies for guests as they enter an office or building.
ALICE® Receptionist is an award-winning, state-of-the-art secure visitor management system that fully automates the guest check-in and registration process. ALICE greets and checks in guests, verifies visitor health, and prints visitor badges. If guests need to speak with an employee, ALICE can connect the guest with onsite or remote employees utilizing two-way video communications. With HourOne, ALICE Receptionist can now offer customers receptionist duties in multiple dialects and languages including English, Spanish, Arabic and French Canadian, with more languages to come - all spoken by a life-like receptionist, generated using AI. Since the Receptionist is generated using code, versus traditional video capture, new content in different languages can be created in a matter of minutes, maintaining the lifelike character and consistency of the receptionist.
This code-driven production process replaces typical video production, which is time consuming, expensive, and static, making it very difficult to generate and then change or update content. Maintaining consistency across different sittings with the same actor - such as trying to achieve the same effect with lighting, clothing, hair and make up - is very challenging or impossible, even if the actor is available when needed to film new content.
Even more challenging is when you want the content spoken in different languages. For instance, real human actors ordinarily don’t speak English, Spanish and Arabic fluently, but with HourOne’s technology, the AI presenter (who appears just as lifelike as a real human actor) can speak any language as though it’s their native tongue, which is particularly important when offering a seamless product solution in different markets.
With HourOne, ALICE can simply submit their text, select their AI receptionist, the language they want, and then generate multiple videos relevant for use across various markets. Using automation and code, the process completely replaces traditional video production. What’s more, any time messaging needs updating, for example if the receptionist needs to inform visitors of new health and safety guidelines, the videos can be changed simply by editing the text - no need for reshoots.
“We were looking for a more efficient and flexible way to produce content at scale, without losing the life-like qualities of a real human subject, which is critical to customer experience standards,” said Wintech CEO Mike Yoder. “After exploring various options, we found HourOne to be the ideal solution for our needs, being the only technology that could replicate the natural human experience as closely as possible. We could translate the same content into multiple languages, seamlessly, using the same receptionist personas. By replacing traditional video production with HourOne’s technology, we can offer a more smooth and agile product, and serve customers better in different markets.”
“Making content the traditional way is a long and costly process, not to mention the severe limitations to revising content needed for agile communications,” said Natalie Monbiot, HourOne Head of Strategy. “With HourOne’s end-to-end video creation platform, we are happy we can help ALICE solve for this, and enable greater scalability while maintaining an elevated customer experience, supporting market expansion.”
About ALICE® Receptionist
ALICE® Receptionist is an advanced visitor management technology that effortlessly processes visitors to buildings while helping keep employees safe from outside threats. Using leading-edge technology, such as motion detection, ID Scanning, image capture, visitor screening, visitor registration, employee alerts, interactive information and voice & video over IP communications, ALICE® Receptionist is helping companies and government agencies around the globe to engage visitors to their buildings. For more information, visit AliceReceptionist.com.
About HourOne
HourOne is an end-to-end video production platform for the world of business, enabling next-level AI automation to scale human-led, personalized communications. Powered by life-like, programmable characters, we bring studio-grade video to all businesses. We use advanced neural networks, machine learning and audio-visual pipelines to create characters that look and sound like real people. This way, a single character can deliver thousands of text lines, in multiple languages, to a video stream which people can interact with. We use a vast cloud infrastructure to maintain those characters, and to generate and edit thousands of videos for businesses across e-learning, e-commerce, digital health, and more. Behind each AI character is a real human being. Through contractual arrangements, we have permission to use their likeness in predefined commercial use cases, for which they earn a fee. We clearly label all commercial content as computer-generated, to respect the user’s right to know.
