Swisscom uses Azure to drive innovation, market leadership with multilingual voice assistant

A digital ambassador for Switzerland’s leading telco

Swisscom understands that the future is often unpredictable, but it believes we always have the opportunity to shape it. The company has earned more than half the market share for telecom and digital TV services in Switzerland by building its brand on technology, innovation, and service. To meet new customer expectations and push more boundaries, Swisscom wanted to create more engaging and intuitive interfaces for its products.

That’s why the company created Swisscom Voice Assistant, a voice-activated smart speaker for its digital TV and video-streaming set-top boxes. In under nine months, Swisscom used Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and the Custom Neural Voice capability, which uses Text to Speech, to build its own multilingual voice assistant capability instead of licensing an available off-the-shelf voice agent. Using these technologies, it created a digital brand ambassador, helping the team maintain ownership of the customer experience and sustain its market leadership.

A unique, intelligent brand persona

The company wants to eventually include Swisscom Voice Assistant in its other smart home products and services, so it needed a powerful and agile voice platform. “By combining our specific industry knowledge with advanced Azure technology, we knew we could build a better voice assistant than any off-the-shelf solution,” says Mihajlo Zivkovic, Program Manager of Voice at Swisscom.

Swisscom used Speech in Cognitive Services, including Text to Speech and Custom Voice, to build a custom voice-activated virtual agent. “In Switzerland, our voice assistant has to support French, Italian, English, and German,” says Riccardo Lopetrone, Senior Product Manager of TV and Entertainment at Swisscom. “With the Custom Voice part of Azure Cognitive Services, we could create voice personas in several languages that sound human and unique to Swisscom.”

Adaptability was key. For example, it wouldn’t be unusual for a customer to speak German while searching for a French movie—so it was vital that the bot could also intelligently operate across languages.

Swisscom now offers a digital persona that uniquely and consistently captures its brand identity and intelligently responds to customers, but the company is also committed to safeguarding customer privacy. “As voice assistants become more embedded in our lives, customers are rightly conscious about privacy and data protection,” says Armin Ledergerber, Product Manager for Data, Analytics, and AI at Swisscom. “Data protection in Azure means that all processing and storage happens in Europe—a critical requirement for us.”

Endless possibilities

By using a wide range of Speech capabilities in Cognitive Services, Swisscom has created a unique voice assistant experience that has exceeded its customers’ expectations and helped it become one of the first to offer voice assistant capabilities in the Swiss market. “We see Microsoft not just as a provider of voice assistant services, but also a teammate,” says Dario Vieceli, Lead for IPTV/OTT Software Development at Swisscom. “We work closely together to develop solutions. Localized knowledge and the constantly evolving ecosystem in Azure set Microsoft apart.”

By analyzing how customers interact with the voice assistant, Swisscom now has access to invaluable insights to help make continuous improvements and better train its speech models. The company can also add new skills and features to its ecosystem as it grows—without having to record new audio with voice talent each time.

“We always keep tabs on the future. With Speech in Azure Cognitive Services, we can better understand our customers and how they engage so that we can be more successful,” says Sevgi Gezici, Senior Communication Consultant at Swisscom. “We’re using Azure to open the door for endless development opportunities.”

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