Channel Corporation, which operates the customer AI platform Channeltalk, said on Tuesday it was introducing an AI phone service, 'Voice ALF', that supports voice AI counselling and would offer 'ALF Marketing' to call customers first.

The company said Voice ALF is a generative AI agent that talks with customers by voice and handles counselling work. It expands the service area of its existing chat-based counselling AI agent, ALF, to phone calls. It provides inbound handling in which AI answers customer inquiry calls, as well as an 'ALF Marketing' function in which AI calls customers first if they meet certain conditions.

If a prospective customer leaves a counselling request on a website, Voice ALF can be set to automatically call and conduct initial counselling. For AS centers, AI can talk with customers in natural language to check whether a product is operating normally and, if needed, send additional support instructions by text message.

Channel Corporation said the microbial food waste processor brand Lincle automated everything from product inquiries to AS intake with Voice ALF, cutting the number of calls handled by counsellors and total call time by about 39 percent and 42 percent, respectively.

Voice ALF uses voice AI technology developed in-house by Channel Corporation. The company stressed it minimizes cases in which AI interrupts customers by using a Turn Detection model that analyzes customer intonation and hesitations to determine whether an utterance has ended.

Channel Corporation also developed text-to-speech technology specialized for Korean-language counselling settings. The company said that by training on voice data from actual Channeltalk counsellors, it can naturally pronounce expressions mixing Korean and English, as well as dates, times and internet addresses (URLs) that existing voice AI found difficult to handle.

Choi Wan-seop (최완섭), chief product officer at Channel Corporation, said, "Phone counselling is still a commonly used customer counselling channel in corporate business activities such as sales, visit reservations and payment guidance." He said, "Going forward, Channel Corporation will continue to focus on innovating the customer phone counselling experience by combining the customer counselling operations capabilities it has accumulated over the past 10-plus years with AI technology."