I think the course that speech is taking in our world is a gradual, evolutionary process of change into a different, more complex and better form. Speech recognition started off as its own separate and unique pillar. Folks used it to dictate (as long as they used the proper pauses between words), then it evolved to allow natural speech (no more pauses).

So that improved some lives. You can speak faster than you can type, but most folks were not willing to put the time and effort into training and maintaining the system. Then we started putting speech into things, rather than desktop computers, and we started making peoples' lives better. For two consecutive years, JD Power and Associates surveys rating customer satisfaction with in-car navigation systems found the top rated cars were from Honda and Acura, which use IBM's Embedded ViaVoice speech recognition technology.

The more places we put speech and find it is an advantage, the more the speech silo breaks down and speech becomes, well, pervasive. Easier to design, deploy and use. Let's look at the evolution of the Contact Center.

It started off as the Call Center, and it ran an IVR that let the customer navigate through a sea of vertical tree prompts to finally get to that one piece of data that they so desperately needed: a bank balance, a phone number, an FAQ. Then we started accepting speech input instead of touch tone input, but things were still frustrating. We started developing specialized Voice User Interfaces that required a new set of human factor skills that were hard to find and expensive to deploy. Even so, our Call Center customers have found our speech solutions improve call retention rates by 6% to 10%, cutting call times by 10%, decreasing costs by up to 90% compared to assisted services. Then came VoiceXML and the whole concept of an open standard for creating speech-enabled self-service applications. We moved the business logic off the proprietary IVR and onto the web server, using a speech browser to render the application, just like an HTML browser renders a web page.

Today, we see the next step in the evolution of speech. The Call Center is now the Contact Center. This is not just a semantic difference. The Call Center was a telephony thing that belonged to the telephony people. The Contact Center is a critical element of our business processes. It is the doorway through which our customers get service when they need it and through the channel they choose to use, whether it be web, phone, device, or even a retail store kiosk. The speech channel has become an integrated channel to access business processes that help us create value, meet threats and opportunities, and reduce costs. Speech has evolved from being speech, to being a piece of the much larger puzzle. To leverage speech you have to embrace the transformation of the Call Center into the Contact Center.

The next logical step in the evolution of the Contact Center is to become part of, and leverage, the Service Oriented Architecture. As companies transform themselves into "on demand" businesses to allow them to quickly adapt to change, and address threats and opportunities, the Contact Center plays a key role as the gatekeeper to those processes. Using open standards-based middleware, such as IBM WebSphere, to make all of these processes available horizontally means quicker deployment of new applications, reduced costs, and ultimately higher customer satisfaction.

As you watch the Call Center crawl out of the primordial IVR matter and become the customer-facing, customer-retaining, customer-embracing Contact Center, you realize you are witnessing evolution.

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Brian Garr is Program Director and Segment Manager for Contact Center Solutions in the Software Group of IBM. He has been with IBM for six years, and is an evangelist and speaker worldwide on machine translation, text to speech and speech recognition. Prior to joining IBM, Garr was a CTO and VP of two startup technology companies. He has a BA degree from Washington & Lee University. Garr received the Smithsonian Institute's "Heroes of Technology" designation in 1998 for his work in machine translation.