Ease them into it
With benefits almost certain to flow from a speech recognition implementation, IT strategists' work is already half done. Of course, all the usual rules of project management--design, implement, test, tweak, retest--apply.
But relatively mature toolkits mean companies implementing speech recognition can focus less on technological specifics and more on mapping process flows and business rules within their organisation.
One area meriting particular attention is the issue of customer acceptance.
Although it's great technology, NLSR takes some getting used to, particularly for relative technical novices without the patience to understand how it's best used.
If it's pushed too hard onto customers or within the company, it can potentially fall flat on its face.
"The biggest challenge at the moment is end user acceptance," warns CallTime's Chambers. "At times where the recognition does fail, people will get frustrated. Even in a car, for example, you've got a lot of noise that could interrupt the session.
The onus is on the company to do their research into the technology, and the challenge for vendors is to create robust applications that will work in any environment-and make the customer happy."
Many customers still aren't, by some accounts. In September, a US study by analyst firm Jupiter Media Metrix (JMM) found that fewer than 40 percent of users prefer speech recognition systems to touch-tone dialling, with 16 percent of those surveyed preferring touch-tone systems over voice. Not surprisingly, young people are far more likely to have used NLSR services than older people.
People that prefer touch-tone dialling may be in the minority, but their presence is a reminder that we have all become used to IVR even if we don't like it. This has implications for the design of speech recognition systems, which should be gradually introduced instead of foisted on customers all at once.
At first, NLSR might only be introduced into a specific part of the IVR sequence, asking customers to say "yes" or "no" to confirm entered details instead of pushing numbers.
A good second step would be the introduction of a very limited vocabulary to a specific function--for example, allowing customers to speak their membership numbers instead of punching them in.
Today's technology offers all but perfect recognition of limited vocabularies such as spoken numbers or letters, and offering this as the second stage of a speech implementation can be an easy way to get customers used to talking to the computer while minimising their frustration.
When designing a NLSR system, forget most of what you know about IVR, that clunky number-based system now ubiquitous in customer handling applications. Many early speech recognition implementations simply gave customers a familiar list of numbered options then had customers speak the number of the option they wanted.
Although this may have been an effort to ease customers into the technology, it also compromises the efficacy of the recognition system.
"Speech recognition has to be fundamentally different from a touchtone solution," says Summerfield. "It's a very different philosophy involved; you're essentially trying to model the way humans actually handle the calls, and then build the speech recognition solution around that."
