Speech And The Future Of The Contact Center

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Oct 2004 by Tehrani, Rich

Without question, speech technologies will change this decade for the better. Speech is the first mode of communication we learn when we are children and it remains the most natural communication interface for humans. I'm not saying that speech technologies will make keyboards disappear anytime soon, but there are a host of applications that lend themselves to speech, and this is where the excitement lies for the industry.

The first area in which speech is a necessity is IVR enhancement, My wife couldn't find her American Express card today. I called American Express and tried to get a live operator on the line as soon as possible, as my mind was busy running through lurid scenarios in which the card, in criminal hands, was being taken on a spending spree up and down Fifth Avenue. In a frantic state, I attempted to reach the correct department. I had to hang up and start again three times during the process because I kept pressing the wrong buttons. I was angry and frustrated by the time a human answered. This is a prime example of a process that cries out for a next-gen speech recognition application.

Speech technologies have the potential to change the way we interact with businesses and other organizations. Agents are on the front lines of our companies, yet we pay them just over minimum wage and expect them to present the polished image of a Fortune 1000 company. (Please don't send me nasty letters, I'm not implying that minimum wage workers can't project the right image. Most of them certainly can. It is the ones that can't who destroy customer relationships forever.)

Speech technologies allow us to be notified if a conversation contains profanity, competitors' names or even voice stress that is higher in decibel than a certain preset threshold. These are the conversations that every company must know about so it can rectify the damage done immediately or, better yet, escalate the calls to a supervisor before they get totally out of control. Speech will change the way contact centers operate over the next decade.

If you think that Indian contact centers are a threat to American call center jobs, just wait until speech comes fully into its birthright. At first, speech will take away some of the repetitive, boring jobs ("What's my balance?"), allowing agents to migrate up the food chain and take more interesting calls. Many companies will allow customers talking to speech systems to immediately connect to a live agent for the purpose of answering more complex questions or even for cross-selling and upselling purposes. Other companies will just reduce headcount.

Still, we need to look at speech as an opportunity in the same manner we looked at the Web. I was once told that the Web meant the death of contact centers. Obviously, the people who predicted this were dead wrong. Perhaps speech technology will lower the barriers to entry in starting a company as it will require fewer agents to be hired. As such, perhaps we will see a steady stream of newly created companies hiring those out-of-work contact center agents. Time will tell.

Enough with the predictions. As you'll see in the next pages, I am really excited about the vendors with which I met to prepare this column. I was able to sit down with various speech vendors, both at shows and in our TMC offices, and I'd like to present you with a summary of who is doing what.

Hosted Speech

MCI (ww.mci.com) is one of several hosted speech providers that has in the past been involved in IVR technology and is now branching out. The company is doing well selling hosred solutions to the government as well as financial services and insurance companies. It is currently working on a robust service creation environment that will allow users to write their own apps and have MCI host them. We can expect to see biometric (voice authentication) support in the future, as well.

Another option to consider when thinking of hosted solutions is the Voice Harbor service from CPT International (www.cptii.com). The company focuses on VoiceXML, speech and multimodal applications and works with VoiceGenie, ScanSoft and others.

Speech For Developers

There is a great deal of activity in creating tools for speech developers. Lumen Vox (www.lumenvox.com) recently announced version 5.0 of its Speech Recognition Engine, LV Speech Tuner, and Speech Driven Information System. There is now support for W3C Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) and Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition (SISR). Developers will also be able to have custom grammars available on-the-fly and modify the engine and grammar performance at run time.

About a decade ago there were app gen (application generator) wars in the CTI, or computer-telephony integration, market. Companies like Parity Software produced environments that competed with the likes of Artisoft (www.artisoft.com), Envox (www.envox.com) and Pronexus (www. pronexus.com). Parity was purchased by the communications group of Intel (www.intel.com) that used to be a standalone company called Dialogic. Since the acquisition, I haven't heard much about Parity's products. Artisoft abandoned its development environment and instead bet the farm on an IP-PBX that has done well over the years. In fact, at press time, Artisoft announced that it is purchasing Vertical Networks. Pronexus and Envox are still alive and kicking and focusing on app gens that do speech.