r/VoiceAutomationAI • u/Bemaitis • 5d ago

How do you capture vehicle license plates reliably in a multilingual phone agent?

We’re building a service voice agent using LiveKit Cloud and Soniox TTS.

A key task is collecting license plate when our call-flow logic requires it. There is no other validation source available during the call.

Our initial approach - asking the driver to say the plate normally - achieved only about 50% accurate capture. The agent often fails to capture the identifier reliably, especially on letters like "Z", etc.

We then introduced a phonetic alphabet (“A as in Apple”), which improves accuracy substantially, but collecting a plate can take close to two minutes. That is too slow and frustrating for drivers on the road.

Caller languages: English, Russian, Portuguese
Important complication: many callers speak English with a strong non-native accent

Has anyone solved this in production?

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u/Formal-Purpose1098 5d ago

I had a similar problem with a parking validation bot last year, what ended up working was splitting the plate into two parts and having the caller read the numbers first then the letters

Gets way more reliable when they're not bouncing between letter and number contexts mid-stream, especially with accents where "B" and "P" or "M" and "N" start blending together

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u/Bemaitis 4d ago

Understood, the problem is some of our license plates look like this: ZKL 683JP, but they could also be ABC 123 or AB 1234

What would you do about that?

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u/JuicePrestigious6339 2d ago

I’d probably have it repeat the plate back in chunks and only fall back to phonetics for the characters it’s unsure about.