In the past year, speech recognition technology seems to have made its long-awaited breakthrough to mainstream acceptance. “It’s not a science-fair project anymore,” says Brian Garr, program director for conversational solutions with IBM (Armonk, NY).
Other vendors agree that speech technology has made major inroads into call centers and, more important, that companies are beginning to develop strategies for implementing speech technology rather than experimenting with a simple application or two.
What accounts for this turnaround? Many competing theories have been proposed. Not surprisingly, vendors have reached differing conclusions about how to design, enhance and market their products.
The speech recognition industry is a complex ecosystem consisting of many products and services. The basis for the industry is the speech recognition engine – software that converts digitized sound waves into written words.
Other significant software products include text-to-speech engines; voice platforms, or development and runtime environments; toolkits that enable you to build, maintain and tune speech recognition applications; tools for monitoring and testing applications; and “packaged” speech applications that call centers can customize and implement within a few months. Speech recognition service providers include integrators, designers, developers and testers, among other specialists that help companies implement speech recognition in their call centers.
The one factor that has changed very little is the speech recognition engine itself. While vendors have tweaked their speech engines to make them work more efficiently and reliably, they haven’t needed to make substantial improvements recently. Kevin Shaughnessy, product manager with Microsoft (Redmond, WA), whose Speech Server includes a speech recognition engine, says that the accuracy of these engines is now a nonissue. “The technology is a commodity,” explains Bruce Balentine, executive vice president of Enterprise Integration Group (EIG; San Ramon, CA). “The value is in the application, not in the technology.”
This article outlines trends with the development of speech recognition software. In another feature article next year, we’ll focus on services that enable call centers to deploy speech recognition as a hosted or network-wide service.
Increasing Call Automation
Speech recognition vendors have traditionally marketed their software as a means of automating and reducing labor costs associated with certain types of customer service calls.
Some of the packaged speech applications coming onto the market have very high call completion rates. For example, call completion rates for TuVox’s (Cupertino, CA) applications of speech recognition that allow callers to look up fares and schedules, make payments and return products range from 14% to 43% above the rates for the touchtone applications they replace. When either customers or TuVox’s system opts to direct calls to agents, agents view transcripts of the automated dialogues that precede the routing of the calls to them.
Another reason more calls can be automated is that the range of speech recognition applications is steadily, if slowly, increasing. One well-received new application is the customer satisfaction survey. Nuance's (Burlington, MA) packaged survey application, for example, can survey customers following a live conversation or automated transaction over the phone. Vendors report that other new and successful speech applications include activations of wireless add-on services and simple technical troubleshooting.
But interest in packaged applications may have peaked, says Peter Mahoney, vice president of worldwide marketing for Nuance, which sells packaged applications to the health, utilities and automotive industries. In the last six to twelve months, according to Mahoney, enterprises have shown more interest in raising call completion rates for their customized applications.
Nuance has accommodated these customers by making it easier for them to create foolproof applications. After analyzing millions of calls, Nuance concluded that callers would trip up speech scripts, for example, when they would offer more information than the speech recognition system requested (System: “Where are you flying from?” Customer: “I’m leaving from Boston on Tuesday.”) or attempted to state corrections the system didn’t understand (“No, not Austin – Boston!”). The most recent version of Nuance’s OpenSpeech Dialog design tool helps designers create applications that deal with these and other common scenarios gracefully. (Nuance merged with another speech recognition software developer, ScanSoft, last month; the combined company is known as Nuance.)
Other vendors have also tried to boost call completion rates. For instance, LumenVox (San Diego, CA) recently improved its Speech Platform’s end-of-speech detection and error-handling capabilities, while the Conversation Engine that Voxify (Alameda, CA) uses to create its packaged applications lets callers choose their own paths through transactions.
Design tools alone can’t create foolproof applications; designer expertise is also required. After several years of experience, best practices have been developed and designers have become more skilled. Vendors are now able to offer expert design advice, such as that given by the “design collaborative” of human factors specialists with Edify (Santa Clara, CA).
Finally, better – and earlier – testing has also increased completion rates. Calls can fail for many technical reasons, including incorrect configurations of equipment, poorly-designed databases or problems with telecom networks. Testing suites, like Empirix’s (Bedford, MA) Hammer systems, typically verify that call centers can route lots of calls and accommodate lots of IVR transactions accurately.
Empirix now incorporates speech recognition among the types of applications that the Hammer systems test. Empirix also offers OneSight Voice Watch, a hosted service that tracks whether your call center’s speech recognition, routing and IVR systems are behaving as you expect. systems are behaving as you expect. Empirix can also provide a nonhosted variant of OneSight Voice Watch, OneSight Voice Engine, that you implement within your call center.
Intervoice (Dallas, TX), a developer of speech recognition tools, offers a usability testing service. Through this service, panels of consumers, who are demographically similar to your customers, provide feedback about how easy it is to use your call center’s applications of speech recognition.
Despite all the effort that call centers have invested in increasing call completion rates, some observers believe that the business case for speech recognition has little or nothing to do with reducing how much time customers are on the phone with live agents.
IBM, for instance, estimates that call completion rates for speech rec average between 10% and 15% higher than that for touchtone; EIG doesn’t find that they are any higher. Dan Miller, co-founder and senior analyst at the San Francisco-based research and analysis firm Opus Research, argues that touchtone applications already handle most of the transactions that lend themselves to automation. He adds that longstanding customers are often expert, and satisfied, touchtone users.
Miller even makes a case for building speech applications to mimic touchtone applications that are already familiar to customers so that “the shock of the new” won’t drive customers away.
