For years, speech analytics have been used worldwide by security organizations to help government agencies identify potential risks and threats. In the past two years, contact centers have begun to use speech analytics applications to capture and structure customer communications. The applications analyze the structured data to identify customer trends and insights for the purpose of improving service quality, customer satisfaction, and generating new revenue.
Milestones in Speech Technology  Past and Future!
Contact centers in several thousand enterprises around the world have derived cost savings and customer satisfaction benefits by deploying speech recognition technology to automate customer service calls. The return on most of these deployments is usually measured in months, and customer satisfaction surveys indicate that callers frequently prefer voice for conducting service transactionsas opposed to touchtone or lengthy live agent interactions.
What Happened to Voice Portals?
being positioned mainly by carriers as wide-scale applications, offering things like specialized audio infotainment services, real-time news, and stock quotes. These sites offered engaging speech-enabled dialog available 24/7 from any standard telephone.
During SpeechTEK 2005, we heard from the winners of STM's Most Innovative Solutions awards and we had the privilege of publicly thanking them for the outstanding work they did in deploying innovative speech solutions.
My recent article on transcription (STM March/April 2005) prompted appeals for more information about voice writing. Here are answers to some of your questions.
Designers have long used state transition systems (STSs) to represent processes. Basically, a STS consists of a set of states (usually represented as ovals) and transitions (represented by arcs) that connect pairs of states. Each transition has a condition that, when satisfied, causes the process to proceed from the state at the tail of the arc to the state at the head of the arc.
Sometimes it helps to have multiple personalities. However, it is generally not helpful when someone else borrows one of these personalities to make unauthorized purchases on one's charge account. For phone-based access to financial services, health records, technical support or more routine customer care, "conversational sign on," which mixes voice biometrics with multi-factor authentication methodologies, should be the preferred method for identity validation.
In 1994-95, 58 percent of legally blind Americans 18 to 54 years old were unemployed, compared to 18 percent of 18 to 54 year olds with no serious impairments. The numbers are staggering, with the disparity being attributed, in part, to inadequate training in access technology and lack of awareness that technology exists to accommodate people who are blind.
For 20 some odd years now telecom industry personnel have talked about the hopeful convergence of telecom and IT, and the emergence of blended manager roles. They have talked and talked and talked. For most of that time it didn't happen, or at least not quickly.