What about the desktop?
Customers' current focus on speech-enabling call centres has also masked the potential of older but less popular desktop speech recognition software.
Originally positioned by technology visionaries like Bill Gates as a major step forward in usability, desktop speech recognition packages like Dragon Systems' NaturallySpeaking and IBM's ViaVoice have failed to ignite the popular imagination due to their high consumption of system resources, far from infallible design, and reduced effectiveness in noisy (read: office) environments.
These issues have kept speech recognition from becoming more than a blip on the radar screen of priorities at most companies, where it's typically installed on a few scattered computers where requested by particularly poor typists.
But it's hard for most people to get used to audibly punctuating every sentence and inserting every comma, something that's continued to hold the technology back. Not even the inclusion of speech recognition in Microsoft's Office XP is likely to change this in the short term, since its ubiquity doesn't change its usability problems.
In the short term, voice may find a more receptive audience on the Web, where technology companies have long been working to add voice support. Their intention is to allow access to Web sites through both mobile and conventional phones, but lack of technical standards and the complexity of remote multimedia support have held them back in the past.
There is a strong momentum for voice-enabling the Web, however. In a recent ACA survey, 43 percent of respondents said it was "quite likely" they would allow access to their Web site using speech recognition, while a further 13 percent said it was "very likely".
Although the success of such projects will clearly depend on user adoption in the long term, they are now closer than ever thanks to VoiceXML (Voice eXtensible Markup Language), which recently entered version 2.0. An offshoot of XML, VoiceXML enables voice interaction with Web sites using meta tags to add meaning to the online content.
Ultimately, VoiceXML support will allow customers to dial into a Web server and navigate the site using their voice. A text-to-speech engine will convert key pieces of text to voice for listening to content, while information will be sent to the Web server using speech recognition and an overlay that places spoken text into the appropriate fields based on their contextual VoiceXML tags.
Widespread VoiceXML use is still some time away, but it's worth investigating as part of any broader strategy to add voice to your selection of customer contact channels.
While speech recognition systems are never going to completely supplant other forms of customer interaction, they are now more than holding their own as an efficient, cost-effective upgrade that should be on next year's wish list for any company that cares about its customers.
