We've been talking to, even yelling at, our computers for years. But it's only recently that they started listening.
The past year has seen speech recognition grow from being a niche novelty product--initially marketed as a panacea for typing-phobic desktop users--into a major new driver for efficiency in customer care.
This surge in interest has created a revenue boom for companies like Nuance, Speechworks, IBM, VeCommerce, and Philips.
These companies are building considerable fortunes cashing in on rapidly growing demand for voice-enabled customer care systems.
Designed to automate the completion of basic transactions requiring a standard set of information, such systems have quickly become a major strategic focus for companies struggling to bring down costs.
In Australia, the first commercial speech recognition applications have included gambling, taxi booking services, banking, and tourism and government applications, and new customers are coming online with increasing frequency. TAB Queensland, NSW's TAB Limited, Gold Coast-based Regent Taxis, share trader TD Waterhouse and Sydney taxi network Combined Communications Network are among the technology's earliest adopters here.
Thanks to a convergence of suitable technology, demonstrable benefits from those implementations and the pressure of continuing economic uncertainty, the future for speech recognition looks bright indeed.
Approximately 1500 companies currently employ 200,000 people at around 4000 call centres within Australia, according to figures from industry analyst firm ACA Research Group. Around four percent of those call centres currently use some form of speech recognition, contributing to a total local market that ACA estimates at just under AU$50 million annually.
That market will grow quickly as the technology gains momentum, according to ACA CEO Martin Conboy. "Speech recognition has gotten over the technology hump [of early scepticism]," he explains. "Speech recognition is ideal for distributing consistent information, and for uncomplex transactions that require low involvement from people-such as making a booking, account enquiry, paying a bill, or placing a bet.
Early adopters see themselves as having a service differentiation and a competitive advantage, and we know that around 45 percent of the call centre market has a watching brief [on it]."
Over the next 24 months, Conboy believes the market will grow rapidly to include 20 percent of Australia's call centres, particularly as increasing demand on company services forces suppliers to pursue more economical alterna tives to employing additional customer service representatives.
"The main driver is the constant cost pressure that businesses are under," he says. "They're always looking for ways to get costs out of their business whilst delivering an acceptable customer experience. And since people will not wait in a queue for very long, Australian businesses face the fact that they are either one click or one phone call away from oblivion-because if they're not offering speech recognition, their competitors will be."
