Advanced, Packaged Applications To Bring Speech Capabilities To The Mass Market

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Feb 2005 by Popova, Elka

From Early Adopters To Mass Market

Speech technologies and solutions have created excitement in the telecommunications market for many years now, but they have not yet reached the mass market. The novelty and complexity of speech solutions have so far required a substantial amount of professional expertise and investment in design, tuning and integration services in order for such solutions to be successfully developed and implemented. The early deployments took months or years, from the initial commitment to the final deployment and integration with existing infrastructure. The inability of vendors and channel partners to standardize, modularize and package products and to reduce the implementation costs have, therefore, limited the penetration of speech technologies to larger enterprises with substantial telecommunications needs and budgets.

The speech technology and solution market is now entering a new stage. It is gradually transitioning from the early adopter stage to the more rapid growth stage, when speech solutions are beginning to penetrate the mass market. As speech solutions are becoming both more sophisticated and more affordable, they are attracting a larger, more diversified customer audience.

The more widespread adoption of speech solutions is being driven by a number of factors, including improvement of quality, increased reliability and declined cost of the underlying speech technologies. Customers feel more comfortable deploying the new technologies as they learn about partners and competitors realizing cost savings and driving revenues through speech solutions. Finally, increased vendor and channel partner expertise and improved understanding of customer needs have resulted in the development of packaged, off-the-shelf applications that save time to market and reduce the total cost of deployment.

Packaged Applications Offer A New Value Proposition

"Packaged applications" is the buzz word (rather, buzz phrase) of the industry today. Vendors, solution providers and integrators seem to have discovered the key to market success and are rushing to develop off-theshelf, plug-and-play solutions. The term "packaged applications" is fairly general and ambiguous, and it could mean different things to different people. Most typically, however, these are more generic, prepackaged solutions that are less expensive and faster and easier to implement than complex solutions developed for a single cuscorner. Therefore, vendors can more rapidly recognize revenues, whereas customers can more rapidly introduce new features and capabilities to clients or employees.

Packaged applications typically solve common and less complicated tasks. Auto attendants and corporate dialers are examples of products that require little customization but can be marketed to a wide and diverse customer audience - virtually any business can benefit from such applications. Messaging products can also be offered prepackaged and ready for implementation with more advanced features available upon customer request. Other examples of simple speech applications that can be prepackaged include password/PIN reset and address change, typical utility and financial service organization functions that currently involve a client interaction with a customer service agent.

One common characteristic of most packaged applications is that they address the needs of multiple customers across multiple vertical markets. In most cases, packaged applications are the so-called plug-and-play type. Therefore, they require little, if any, design, tuning or integration services. When they are also integrated with off-the-shelf hardware, they are very economical and easy to deploy.

Packaged applications are likely to help vendors both expand their customer reach and penetrate a more diverse customer audience. Small and medium-sized businesses, in particular, will now be able to deploy some speech applications that they could not afford earlier. The growth of packaged applications is likely to have a slightly negative impact on average revenues per customer, especially on the service portion. Packaged applications will, however, most certainly help vendors both increase customer awareness and encourage a larger number of people to test speech solutions. Therefore, packaged applications will drive a larger number of deployments and, eventually, revenues.

Packaged Applications Will Drive Competition

We believe that the success of speech solutions continues to be dependent upon the entrepreneurial spirit of market participants and their ability to create, market and promote advanced speech applications. The entrepreneurial spirit of companies such as Nuance and Speech Works (now part of ScanSoft) helped the market grow from the lab stage to early adoption. The two leading core technology vendors educated the market about the benefits of speech, and they invested a tremendous amount of time, effort and money in developing viable technologies and in helping customers implement solutions to meet their specific needs. Now solution vendors need to take this effort further and continue innovating and developing solutions that offer a greater value to customers.