Site testing of a cutting-edge voice response system began today at the Centre for Pharmaceutical Postgraduate Education (CPPE) in central Manchester. The new system from Cobalt, the well-known automated transaction solutions provider, will act as a portal to serve the professional development needs of all 45,000 registered community pharmacists practising within England.

Discussions for the delivery of this system began more than two years ago, although the final confirmation of Cobalt as the successful winner of the competitive tender process did not take place until last December.

The new system will handle enquiries about Continuous Professional Development (CPD) from pharmacists 24 hours-a-day. CPD is provided in the form of either course programmes or distance learning packages. Both the breadth of CPPE's offerings, and the necessary security requirements, mean that Cobalt had to design and provide a solution using ground breaking text-to-speech (TTS) technology.

Within conventional voice response systems, concatenated elements of previously recorded human speech are strung together by the software in response to the caller's needs. The business requirements of this system mean that, in addition, many of the spoken words heard by the caller are also produced by the software and therefore many parts of the speech that are heard are wholly synthetic.

This synthesis is achieved by a phonetic analysis of the appropriate descriptive words held in the core SQL database. Traditionally, such modelling techniques have resulted in voices with undeniably Dalek-like intonation but, following considerable refinement work, Cobalt is confident of having created a natural sounding customer environment that finally transcends this drawback.

The use of this very advanced technology for a public system, whilst not unique, is at the leading edge of current voice processing capability. Very intensive processing power is required and four of the latest Intel processors working in concert are used to deliver the necessary processing power for the twelve lines employed. The system will go live for public use in July and integrates with an existing Index PABX and a powerful SQL database.

Notes to editors

The Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education (CPPE) is the organisation which provides continuing education and continuing professional development opportunities for all the community pharmacists in England. The Centre was established in 1991 by the NHS Executive and it is funded directly by the Department of Health. Every year it provides over 38,000 continuing education programmes covering clinical and professional subjects and is the only provider to do so at no cost to the user. 

Click here to link to the CPPE website