The same call, spoken or typed, changed halfway through
Talking and typing are not two products here. They are one conversation with two ways in and out of it — the same session, the same call id, the same transcript and recording and report. Turning the microphone off and typing does not start anything again.
The thing voice AI always gets wrong
Order numbers, postcodes, email addresses, registration plates. Every voice assistant mishears them, and asking a customer to spell it out twice is where they give up.
INV-4471Type it, carry on talking. The most reliable failure in the category, repaired by the customer in one tap.
No "leave your number"
Every chat widget hits the same wall: the question gets complicated, typing gets tedious, and the escape is a callback form. The customer is gone.
Here they just start talking, in the same window, with everything already said still known — because no chat product that does not own a voice channel can offer that.
Not a lesser path
Somebody deaf, hard of hearing, or who does not use speech takes the same call as everyone else, in the same queue, with the same handover to a person.
The microphone stays off unless they turn it on — and someone who is deaf but does speak can talk and read the replies.
What carries across the switch: everything said so far, whatever has already been confirmed about who they are, a booking half-made, the product being discussed, the order being tracked. Not a summary of it — the conversation itself, because it never ended.
Tested rather than assumed: a caller spoke, typed a reference number, then spoke again to ask the assistant to confirm what they had typed — and it read INV-4471 straight back. One call, one transcript, the thread never restarted in either direction.
And a caller on a weak connection is not choosing between talking and nothing. When the line will not hold audio, the same conversation continues in text at a fraction of the data — which is the reason this earns its place twice over, once for accessibility and once for a bad signal.