Midland’s ‘Jackie’ AI Cuts Missed Calls With ElevenLabs (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Bars down, Eleven Labs has the absolute best voice synthesis technology out in the market. If you look at other large competitors, they don't, they don't compare. My name is Stephen Sierra-Allcabes. I work for the city of Midland as their process engineer officer. We have, you know, thousands of phone calls coming in each day. There's over 3,000 phone calls. So that's one use case is having calls that are typically missed, diverted then to our agent in our case is called Jackie. So Jackie 2.0 as we, as we call her is our AI assistant, our AI civic concierge for our city of Midland citizens. Jackie at this moment is able to provide citizens answers to not only most commonly sourced questions, but also answers to more complex situations that a simple chat bot that you could purchase, you know, straight from another vendor will definitely not be able to provide. And instead of getting forwarded to a voicemail or getting forwarded to a very robotic voice agent, they are getting forwarded to an agent that, again, understands the complexity of human interaction, understands context, is able to speak with, with empathy and with contextual understanding. The other use case that we also have for Jackie, which we just went, not live, but in beta across the entirety of our website is, it's a widget. We created a custom UI that's powered by 11 laps. And what this does is it will likely lead to the reduction of the amount of phone calls that come in to source very basic questions that shouldn't really, you know, necessitate a phone call to begin with. And so right now, the very basics, like I said, are our phone calls and on our website, but we do have plans on expanding our use case even further. And so what we project is the ability to reduce about 600 missed calls per day without getting into naming the other competitors. I think that we all know which ones they are, but truth be told is you can get something at a fraction of the cost with much better latency, much better contextual awareness, much better sense of emotion and empathy, which are things that are extremely important for our citizens. Each additional second of white space, as you would call it, in lag time, just waiting for an answer, reduces customer satisfaction rates significantly. And so understanding that going with the best provider, that being 11 labs, really, it was a no brainer for us. Before we didn't have anything comparable. I mean, really, it's the typical press one for, you know, or press zero for operator, press one for this department, press two for that. It's your typical banking experience, right? You call a bank and you end up yelling operator like three times. It's just, I can't compare it at all because there just wasn't any. One of the things that I really enjoy about 11 labs agent platform is the ability to develop those visual workflows. And what this does in turn from a practical level is it reduces your cost associated with LLM usage, because although your agent may have one LLM being deployed, your main agent, your sub agents can have different LLMs being used. And you also don't create a massive knowledge base repository that's being rag indexed by every single question. And so this drastically reduces latency, but it also reduces the cost with LLM usage. So in Midland, Texas, we have a population of about 138,000 individuals. Most of our population speak English and Spanish. You do have a subset of the population, which is less than 2% of the total that speak additional languages such as Taiwanese or Mandarin and a very small subsection as well that also speak in Arabic. And regardless of the language, I mean, we want to make sure that we are able to provide services in a matter that feels equitable, right? It's ensuring that every voice feels heard, that every individual that interacts with our city is able to feel valued, feel cared for, and being able to ensure that we're able to communicate in their natural language is going to help break barriers. Eleven Labs allows us to easily add additional language capabilities at a flick of a toggle. In the government sector, security is extremely vital. If you can't demonstrate that you are protecting individuals' privacy and there are risks associated with data breaches and things of that nature, you can find yourself in a world of not only legal trouble, but at the end of the day, you're losing the trust of your customer base and that, in our case, is our citizens. And we owe it to our citizens to do everything that we can to ensure that they feel that their information is safe when they are interacting with our AI assistants. Right now, we are also testing our Eleven Labs agents with our Lean Six Sigma training and certification program so that our students can interact with an instructor assistant, if you will, that is able to 24-7 provide that student with support in any of the areas within the course that that student may need. And it does so really wonderfully. Would I recommend Eleven Labs to other cities? Absolutely yes, hands down. Eleven Labs beats every other competitor out there in terms of technology, in terms of price point. And as far as becoming a legitimate partner with a city, I do feel that Eleven Labs has given our city a lot of support, provided a lot of flexibility throughout the procurement process and it is something that I believe any other city out there looking to really push the boundaries of what they can do for their citizens by incorporating AI into their services can certainly benefit from what Eleven Labs has to offer. Do your research. Look at other companies. Look at their price points. Look at their actual technical capabilities, but then beyond the numbers, beyond the specs, test it out yourself. Verify it, you know, get a test API key, see what it does for yourself and, you know, begin to really see for yourself what exactly it is about Eleven Labs that puts it a punch way above the rest.