“Julie” - the perky voice that answers the phone at 1-800-USA-RAIL, Amtrak’s reservation line - is now trained to process credit card payments for a rail reservation. What took Julie so long to learn credit card transactions? She is really a machine - eight machines, to be precise.

Julie is an automated voice response system developed by SpeechWorks of Boston to field queries about train status, reservations and fares. Julie was originally put into limited service in April 2001, and SpeechWorks and Amtrak have been steadily adding to Julie’s range of capabilities.

Listen to Julie in action:

Using a voice-enabled credit card system tweaked to work with Amtrak’s back-end data systems, SpeechWorks brought credit card processing online in April of this year. “Previously, customers had been able to book a trip [using Julie], but if they wanted to pay for it over the phone, they were transferred to an agent, who would take the credit card info and close the book,” says Matt Hardison, chief of sales, distribution and customer service at Amtrak.

Julie, named after the real person that gives a voice to the system, resides on specialized servers located in Amtrak’s East Coast and West Coast call centers. Every one of the 20 million calls that comes into the Amtrak reservation number annually are initially answered by Julie, with 25% to 33% of the total completely handled by the automated system, Hardison says. With eight servers spread over two locations, Hardison believes the system has enough excess capacity to handle one of the boxes going offline.

The automated system is designed to help field the simpler queries and trip reservations. More complicated trips bookings such as multi-leg, round-trip transcontinental train rides are usually passed along to a human agent.

SpeechWorks created the user interface and workflow, and Intervoice supplied the hardware that runs Julie. Interestingly, a different approach was taken with Julie’s demeanor then is usually taught to human customer service agents at Amtrak. Hardison says the real-life agents are trained to give information and ask questions in a more formal manner. “Julie is what some people call ‘perky’,” he says. “She’s a little less formal than a live agent and [customers] are more comfortable working with her style than a live agent.”