PDF of this tutorialHow Commercially Viable Are Current Speech Technologies for IVRs?
Analysts and technology experts are increasingly vocal about the commercial potential of today's speech-recognition technologies. In June 1998, the Gartner Group announced that "speech-recognition technology finally works and is viable for customer service organizations. It is . . . an emerging 'self-serve' technology that will enhance customer service while reducing personnel costs."
Speech recognition technology has matured to the point that IVR systems can reliably and accurately recognize spoken responses more than 90 percent of the time. "Speech recognition is accurate for all but the most risk averse environments," says Donna Fluss, an analyst with Gartner Group, Inc.
For IVR suppliers, the addition of speech recognition capabilities provides opportunities for incremental revenues, increases the variety of automated service delivered over the telephone, and increases the demand for telephony equipment.
Just as interactive touch-tone applications fueled the development of new businesses, speech recognition is creating new opportunities for imaginative entrepreneurs.
Businesses are currently using speech-enabled IVRs in the following ways:
- package tracking
- stock quotes and trading
- insurance claims
- travel booking
- pharmacy prescription refills
- restaurant reservation information
- banking
- social services administration and delivery by government agencies
- directory assistance
What are Industry Experts Predicting about the Adoption of Speech Recognition in the IVR Systems of the Future?
"Speech recognition has gone from the bleeding edge to the leading edge," says Brian Bischoff, general manager for AT&T Solutions Business Development. The top 25 percent of large companies are implementing their first-level speech applications, he says, because in the near term, speech recognition provides a bigger gain than even the Web. "That's how customers contact and interact with businesses." (Information Week, February 22, 1999).
William S. Miesel, a leading speech industry consultant and president of TMA Associates, noted in 1998 that the availability of speech recognition on the platform is already becoming an important customer criterion for the purchase of an IVR or computer telephony system. Fluss estimates that by 2003, 30 percent of the new automated lines in call centers will respond to customers' speech.
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"Often, when people begin to interact with conversational [IVR] systems, they tend
to be conversational in return. Consequently, a good speech interface is one that
will steer them into providing only responses that the system can recognize."
—Speech Technology Magazine, April/May, 1999 |
These systems use directed dialogue to constrain caller responses to those that will be easily and accurately understood. Fluss says that a directed speech recognition application will pay for itself within nine to eighteen months in a call center with more than fifty agents.
In his Telephony Voice User Interface report, Miesel predicted that total worldwide revenues from advanced speech technology products and services in telephony (including speech recognition, speaker verification, and text-to-speech) will exceed $38 billion by 2003.
