A company has to understand both the nature of and how much education its target audience needs, argues Lynda Kate-Smith, chief marketing officer at speech software vendor Nuance.
Kate-Smith has been in Australia attending Dimension Data's conference in Coolum, where the vendor provided the engine which powered the voice recognition capability for the forum's delegate information line.
Kate-Smith believes that enterprises are increasingly scrutinising whether proposed IT projects provide sufficient return on investment. "They're looking at 'is the technology worth bringing into the company?'--solid return on investment," she said.
According to Kate-Smith, the types of applications corporates look for when deploying speech technology are customer care; information delivery; transactions; and productivity.
Verification to prevent against fraud was another reason Kate-Smith cited, where a person's "voice print" can be used to identify a customer prior to a transaction being carried out. "The beauty of voice prints is that they're very unique and as long as you have a telephone you can record it," she said. Once recorded the voice print can be stored in a database and used to verify customers when they phone in to carry out transactions.
Earlier this year a Technology & Business magazine report cited research from industry analyst firm ACA Research Group, which found that there are about 1500 companies currently employing 200,000 people at around 4000 call centres in Australia, of which around four percent currently use some form of speech recognition.
Vivienne Fisher travelled to Coolum as a guest of Dimension Data.
