Afghan businesses are loving the new HD Voice Service now available exclusively from Afghan Wireless. A digital innovation that’s becoming more and more widely used, HD Voice uses wideband audio technology to deliver more than twice the sound (or double the frequency) of a standard call. With HD Voice, even when someone is speaking to you from halfway around the world, it sounds like they’re right next door; and this sound quality is the same whether your call is a person-to-person conversation, a 12-person international conference call, or a speech-to-text recording.
That’s great news for businesses whose operations involve a lot of over-the-phone communication, whether locally or internationally. If your company is thinking about upgrading to HD Voice, here are five reasons to make the switch:
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Fatigue reduction
Image courtesy Babak Fakhamzadeh | Flickr
The difficulty with narrowband, or standard, phone calls is that they have to clip sounds in order to make the call fit within the narrower sound range that they support. This means that when you’re on a standard phone call, you’re missing out on a significant range of word sounds and information. The result is that your brain has to work harder to fill in the gaps, and you need to concentrate more on context and other clues to figure out what the person you’re speaking to is saying.
This may not be a significant issue for short, infrequent calls, but for longer or repeated calls, it can cause serious mental fatigue. Customer service representatives who spend their days on the phone with clients can find themselves making mistakes because they have surpassed their concentration limits, and executives can miss critical pieces of business information on longer calls. The clarity of HD Voice helps reduce this level of fatigue, thus leading to greater productivity levels for everyone in your business.
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Better comprehension
Conversations that involve a lot of technical jargon, acronyms, or similar-sounding words can be hard to understand on a standard narrowband call. Callers are constantly having to ask for more explanation or for the other party to repeat words. Sometimes, people have to send information via e-mail when they can’t get their message across verbally.
The increased level of sound information that HD Voice provides greatly diminishes confusion arising from hard-to-understand words, thereby allowing information to be communicated accurately and effectively the first time around. This is a particular advantage for businesses, such as those in the legal, medical, or financial professions, whose operations involve a great deal of specialized terminology.
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Excellent conference-calling capabilities
HD Voice is quickly becoming the must-have technology for conference calls: business leaders around the world, including many Fortune 500 executives, are starting to insist on HD Voice as by far the most effective way to handle conferencing.
Not only does HD Voice offer greater clarity and better comprehension, it also makes it much easier to identify who is speaking due to the way it brings out the nuances of individual voices. This allows conversations to be more personal while they are in progress (no more guessing which of the 12 other people on the call is speaking at any given moment), and it reduces the possibility of mistakes or misunderstandings later on (for instance, if important information is sent to the wrong person following the call because the identity of the speaker was not clear).
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Improved multicultural communications
Image courtesy Impassion Afghanistan | Flickr
Today’s global economy means that more companies than ever are conducting their business in more than one language. And while overseeing businesses transactions and directing negotiations in another language is challenging enough in person, it can be even more difficult during phone conversations, when key non-verbal information, like facial expressions or gestures, is not visible. In addition, the limited capability of standard narrowband calls often makes it difficult to interpret different accents or nuances in tone.
HD Voice helps bring greater clarity to calls involving non-native speakers, thereby allowing them to better understand other speakers and be more clearly understood themselves. This is particularly important when neither or none of the parties on a call are speaking in their first language. In this case, clarity of vocabulary, accents, and tone can make a huge difference.
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Greater transcription accuracy
When it comes to creating transcriptions, HD Voice is better at providing high-quality, raw information for processing by both humans and computers. That’s because the words are clearer, the sound information is more complete, and the sound quality is clearer and more detailed. These factors let human beings hear and understand a recording much more easily, which greatly reduces errors in speech-to-text processing that arise from misunderstood words or sounds.
Similarly, HD Voice will also improve other business activities that rely on automated speech recognition, like call-center management and routing systems that use interactive voice-response systems.