Fonolo

Never listen to a phone menu again.

Everybody hates those dreaded touch-tone menus (“Press 1 for English”). It’s so frustrating to have to listen to all of those options over and over again (“Please listen carefully as our menu has changed”). Well, no longer. Fonolo transcribes the phone menus of large companies, so you can navigate them visually.

Skip the navigation. Get right to the business.

Pick the company you need, scan through their phone menu visually, then just click the spot you need to call. Fonolo will automatically dial, navigate their menu and then dial your phone. When you answer, you will be connected to the right spot in the menu. We call that “Deep Dialing”. You’ll call it smart.

You probably call the same set of companies all the time. At Fonolo.com, you can bookmark any point in a phone menu and access that bookmark as a simple URL through your browser or smart phone.

Coming soon: Access your Deep Dial bookmarks by calling our voice-driven portal. (e.g. “Get me Delta Airlines!”)

Stop scrambling to find notes from your last call.

When you make a call using Fonolo, your call is routed through our servers so that we can “Deep Dial” for you. But having Fonolo as an intermediary on the call has another advantage – it allows us to build and maintain an “Intelligent Call History” for you.

You probably keep a log somewhere of calls you’ve made to certain companies – time and date, name of the agent, what was said, etc. This is especially important when documenting a billing dispute for example. Fonolo automates this process, making it simple to keep track of your calls, notes and recordings.

Fonolo’s Intelligent Call History:

• automatically organizes all of your calls to a given company, regardless of which phone you used or which number was dialed.
• stores recordings of all the calls that you can review at any time or forward to someone by email. (Coming Soon: transcriptions.)
• allows you to write text notes during a call that get stored with the history. You can later search and review those notes.

How does it work?

So how do we do this? We've built revolutionary technology that "spiders" the phone system, much like a web search engine spiders the web. Our system dial companies, navigate their menus and use a combination of speech recognition, signal processing and human editing to maintain a map of “phone space”.

Since phone menus can change at any time, we continually spider each company to keep the database current. This is a very challenging technical problem (that we've protected with patents) and it yields a data set that has never been built before.

Every time a user requests a “Deep Dial”, we validate the entire path through the phone menu using this same technology. In real-time, we listen to audio from the call and use speech recognition to determine if it’s a match to the information we have stored in our database. Our approach of “node validation” ensures that we always route customers to exactly the right spot in a company’s phone menu.

Fonolo is co-founded by Shai Berger and Jason Bigue. They each have over ten years of experience in telecom and Internet startups. They co-founded Streamcheck (sold to Keynote Systems in 2003) and were key early employees at ElectroPhotonics (sold to JDSU in 2000).