A Talk With Nuance's Lynda Kate Smith

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Oct 2004

The editors of Customer Interaction Solutions® recently spoke with Lynda Kate Smith, vice president and chief marketing officer of Nuance Communications (www.nuance.com), to hear her opinions on the present and future of speech technologies.

CIS: What needs do speech-based call center technologies serve that traditional touch-tone IVR systems do not?

LKS: More and more businesses, throughout a range of industries, are recognizing the business benefits of speech versus traditional touch-tone technology. Speech improves customer satisfaction and retention, reduces the overall cost of customer service and increases automation rntos, ns customers rend to stay within voice-enabled automated systems rather than opting out to a live agent. Analyst research indicates speech boosts customer use of automated systems from 20 to 60 percent, compared with touch-tone. On the business side, voice automation can dramatically reduce the cost of handling calls, delivering a return on investment in just a few months. Analysts at Cahners In-Stat and Giga report the average cost-per-call handled by agents ranges anywhere from $2 to more than $15. With voice automation, that cost is often cut to 20 cents or less per call.

From a caller experience standpoint, speech technology shortens the duration of calls by eliminating on-hold times and providing more streamlined, round-the-clock access to information. Customers get where they want to be with fewer steps and hassles - something very important since today's customers have neither the time nor the patience to wait on hold or navigate through a myriad of touch-tone prompts to get what they need. Speech is intuitive and user-friendly (there's no need to memorize choices) and is more responsive to customers' needs. In fact, a 2003 Harris Interactive study we commissioned revealed that nine out of 10 surveyed consumers preferred speech recognition to touch-tone.

Another benefit of speech is enhanced security. It's been estimated by the Federal Trade Commission that identity theft and fraud affect nearly 10 million people and cost businesses upwards of $60 billion per year. Companies are searching for ways to secure their call centers while reducing costs and promoting customer convenience. Voice authentication (voiceprint technology) allows businesses to offer secure, personalized over-the-phone customer service. Many financial institutions nave implemented voircprinr Technology to verify customers and to reduce I.D. theft and fraud. Before transactions (i.e., checking a bank account balance) are authorized, users' spoken voiceprints are compared to those previously enrolled and on file. The transactions are performed only after an exact match is made, based on the unique characteristics of the caller's voice. With automated voice authentication, more callers remain in the automated system, and agents can focus on addressing high priority customer issues.

CIS: At this point, have we seen all of the enterprise and consumer applications for speech, or do you think what we've got thus far is the tip of the iceberg?

LKS: What we've seen so far is only the tip of a very large iceberg. In the past year alone, we've seen a tremendous increase in demand for voice automation solutions. Speech is no longer an add-on for big companies with ample discretionary budgets; it's a necessity for any company, large or small, that uses the telephone as a means of communicating with customers. We anticipate that speech applications for enterprises and consumers will evolve, continuing the current momentum.

Voice automation is following a similar path that we've seen enterprise software markets travel over the past few years: it's moving from custom applications to packaged applications. Packaged applications speed speech application deployment and time-to-market while increasing customer satisfaction. Nuance's packaged applications leverage the company's best practices in voice automation yet also have the flexibility to meet company-specific business and technology requirements. Packaged applications empower companies to configure, manage and maintain their own applications, serving as an easy-to-deploy alternative to built-from-scratch speech applications. This trend will further drive adoption in all markets.

CIS: I've heard it said that the actual code behind speech recognition is some of the most complicated code ever to be written. Can you expound on why the creation of the actual engine is so complex?

LKS: The combination of speech recognition (the ability to interpret words and commands) coupled with natural language understanding (the capability to conduct conversations between humans and machines) is very complex. Nuance alone has been refining this technology for more than 10 years as an independent entity and for many years prior as a part or the Stanford Research Institute.

There are two reasons for the complexity. The main reason, of course, is the complcxity of human speech. It is widely varied, subtle, contextual, accented, and the engine must overcome the variations in spoken language to reach a correct interpretation of the request with a high degree of accuracy. The second challenge is deployment environment. Telephones are used everywhere, from the relative quiet of a home or office, to airports, trains and automobiles. They're both wired and wireless. Ultimately, it's any device with a microphone and a network connection. The speech engine must be able to overcome all of the challenges associated with the deployment environment and, to a further degree of complexity, in the product design.