if a customer would rather say their question than type it, a typed-only chat makes them do the slow part. a retune bot takes the question as voice and answers it in the chat.
the video starts in the bot's settings. then a customer asks about delivery with the mic, sends a voice note about a birthday cake, and the owner looks at her inbox.
there's a mic next to the text box. they tap it, talk and tap stop. while they talk, the button turns red and a timer runs.
an x next to it throws the recording away and sends nothing. a recording stops by itself at 60 seconds.
if they already have a voice note on their phone, they can upload the file instead. the usual audio files work, like m4a, mp3 and wav, up to 15 mb.
their words show up in the chat as text, with a small voice tag and how long they talked. then the bot answers from what it knows about your business, the same way it answers typed questions.
if you switch on read aloud, the bot reads that answer to them. every answer also gets a speaker button, so they can play it again. it uses the voice built into their browser, so it sounds different on different phones.
spoken messages land in your inbox with the typed ones. each has a mic tag and its length, so you can tell who talked.
the audio isn't kept. you get the text of what they said, and you can't play the recording back.
if your bot asks for a name and email first, the same checks run on spoken answers. say a customer says their email and it comes out as "jo at gmail dot com". the check fails and the text goes back into the box, so they can fix it before it's sent.
voice isn't switched on for new accounts by itself. sign up, then email me at olive@reframe.so and say you want voice messages on your bot. once it's on, there's a voice section in your bot's settings:
you can mention the mic in your greeting, like "ask me anything, or tap the mic and talk." if people open the chat and don't know what to ask, starter buttons help with that part.
it can mishear. names and numbers come out wrong now and then. the customer sees the text before the answer, so they can tell when it heard wrong and type it instead.
it's for the chat on your website. it doesn't answer phone calls, and it doesn't take voice messages on whatsapp or telegram.
the mic needs your site on https (the padlock in the address bar), with the chat added using the code snippet retune gives you. if whoever made your site added the chat another way, the mic won't work until that's switched.
i tested it in chrome on a computer, not on a phone. try the mic on yours before you tell customers about it.
the bot keeps the text, how long they talked and whether it came from the mic or a file. that sits in your retune account.
it fits if your customers ask short questions and some of them would rather talk. people with their hands full, or people who just don't like typing on a phone.
if what you want is a phone line that answers calls, this isn't that. and if your questions need a long back and forth, voice won't make that shorter.
i also wrote to a repair shop where people ask from the side of the road, if that's closer to yours. and if your real problem is questions that come in after you've closed, start there.
olive