This post is co-authored by Dhurjati Brahma, Senior Systems Architect at T-Mobile US, Inc, Jim Chao, Principal Engineer/Architect at T-Mobile US, Inc, and Nicholas Zellerhoff, Associate Systems Architect at T-Mobile US, Inc.
T-Mobile US, Inc. offers a voicemail-to-text service to its customers, allowing them to quickly read their voicemails and respond to and manage messages in any order without having to dial their voicemail. This service is provided by the T-Mobile Voicemail system and uses Amazon Transcribe to convert voicemail messages to text. In 2023, T-Mobile launched the voicemail-to-text translation feature. Powered by Amazon Translate, this feature allows customers to request voicemail transcripts in the language of their choice from the native Visual Voicemail app available on devices from major Android manufacturers, starting with flagship devices and all future devices. available from major device partners.
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The history
Two years ago in 2021, T-Mobile engineering teams partnered with AWS to launch a new ai-powered feature called Voicemail to Text with automatic language detection and to improve quality and performance for customers. Voicemail to Text provided customers with the added benefit of receiving voicemail transcripts at no additional cost. Voicemail to Text is available in 39 different spoken languages and dialects and uses automatic language detection provided by Amazon Transcribe. These languages included English and Spanish, as well as many European, Middle Eastern, Asian, and African languages. The full list of supported languages can be found in the Amazon Transcribe documentation. Since its introduction, usage of the voicemail-to-text service has increased, transcribing 126 million voicemail messages per month as of July 2023. T-Mobile has partnered with AWS to analyze key app metrics. this service, such as language distribution, number of messages per language, daily total and unique active clients, etc. This data helped expand service and make key business decisions to improve the voicemail-to-text customer experience.
The challenge
Analyzing the weekly distribution of voicemail transcripts by language, T-Mobile found that approximately 10 percent of voicemail transcripts were received in a language other than US English, with Spanish being the predominant language. .
In addition, market studies were carried out based on US Census Bureau The data showed that approximately 22 percent of the American population spoke a language other than English. This showed the need for a voicemail-to-text translation feature that could close this language gap and prompted the T-Mobile and AWS teams to come up with a solution. The idea was to give T-Mobile voicemail-to-text customers the option to receive voicemail transcripts in the language of their choice via SMS, email, or through the Visual Voicemail (VVM) application.
The solution
T-Mobile decided to use Amazon Translate, a neural machine translation (MT) service, to augment its existing voicemail-to-text service with real-time text translation between supported languages because Amazon Translate provided high-quality translation services. necessary in the industry. T-Mobile already had its voicemail system connected to AWS through a private AWS Direct Connect link and was using the Amazon Transcribe API to obtain transcripts. Following the same design pattern, T-Mobile added an integration with the Amazon Translate API to translate voicemail transcriptions from the source language detected by Amazon Transcribe to customers’ preferred language.
Below is a high-level architecture diagram illustrating T-Mobile’s voicemail-to-text translation solution.
From a customer perspective, to enable the visual voicemail translation feature, a customer needs a service operator code (SOC) for the voicemail-to-text feature enabled on their mobile plan and must have one of the Major devices from major Android manufacturers supported with the translation feature API enabled. The customer can then visit the visual voicemail settings page to select a language from a list of 75 different languages and dialects supported by Amazon Translate. This will allow customers to receive the voicemail transcript in the supported language of their choice.
The results
With Amazon Translate, T-Mobile was able to deliver a delightful new customer experience that adapts to its customers’ language preferences and makes voicemail more accessible for people who speak multiple languages. This new capability helps break down language barriers by making it easier for speakers of different languages to communicate.
Conclusion
By using the linguistic artificial intelligence services of Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Translate, T-Mobile was able to improve its voicemail service by delivering message transcriptions in a language that customers can understand. By choosing to use ai services managed by AWS, T-Mobile was able to accelerate the delivery of this new customer experience and avoid the operational burdens of maintaining additional servers and software in its data centers. With Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Translate, voicemail-to-text translation and voicemail-to-text translation services are delivered with low latency and high accuracy.
For more information, see Get started with Amazon Translate and Get started with Amazon Transcribe to explore how you can use these services with your applications. Follow the artificial intelligence category on the AWS Machine Learning blog to stay up to date with new capabilities and use cases for various AWS ai services.
About the authors
Dhurjati Brahma is a Senior Systems Architect at T-Mobile US, Inc. He has over 15 years of experience designing, building and managing robust and scalable virtualized messaging solutions within the T-Mobile network. He is passionate about collaborating with multiple cross-functional teams and vendors to securely integrate T-Mobile messaging systems with the public cloud to launch exciting new products and services for T-Mobile customers. He has a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Outside of work, he enjoys hiking, listening to classical music, practicing meditation, and spending time with his family and friends.
Jim Chao is the Principal Engineer/Architect at Core Messaging Service Design at T-Mobile US, Inc. He has over two decades of experience designing and architecting mobile messaging service systems and platforms. Lately, he has been dedicating his time to the next generation of messaging services using machine learning and generative artificial intelligence. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Information Systems. Outside of work, he spends time with family and studies and practices religion extensively, as well as traveling to religious sites above 5,000 meters in the mountains of Tibet.
Nicolas Zellerhoff is an associate systems architect for T-Mobile as part of the services technology development team and serves as lead development engineer for native visual voicemail services. When he’s not in office, Nick enjoys everything outdoors, from backyard barbecues with friends to backcountry hikes in the North Cascades.
Alex Bulatkin He is a solutions architect at AWS. He enjoys helping communications service providers create innovative solutions on AWS that are redefining the telecommunications industry. He is passionate about working with customers to bring the power of AWS ai services to their applications. Alex lives in the Denver metro area and enjoys hiking, skiing, and snowboarding.
Prabhakaran Balasubramaniam He is a Senior Customer Solutions Manager at AWS. She loves helping telecommunications customers leverage new technologies to solve their problems. Prabhakaran resides in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and enjoys sports.
