Date/Time Impacted

2023-01-17 21:21 UTC - 2023-02-01 14:19 UTC

Services Impacted

Automatic Speech Recognition (Voice API Input action)

Summary

We began to receive an increased response of text numbers, instead of digit numbers, in ASR responses from Vonage’s supplier. We also saw a number of 0 (null) confidence responses returned in ASR responses from Vonage’s supplier.

Vonage began experiencing the changed responses on 17th January. Vonage detected these changes when some of Vonage's proactive monitoring started failing due to digit and text forms of numbers being included in the context, but only the digit form of numbers being expected.

Root Cause

Vonage's Speech to Text (STT) supplier has started automatically opting in all of their customers into their new version of STT, which has different models available and does not currently support the confidence score. This is causing an increased quantity of numbers to be returned as text. This move to automatically opt-in Vonage was made without proper communication to Vonage, thus leading to a breaking change.

Restoration Actions

Customers should expect to receive numbers in both a digit and text form for ASR input and not rely on the confidence score.

Next Steps

We are working with our supplier to ensure such changes are made with the correct notice and announcement for the future.