Business Value Proposition of Speech Recognition

Business Value Proposition of Speech Recognition

Software engineers have been working on voice recognition for over 40 years, and it had previously been a sci-fi like reality – but has its time finally arrived?

The human ear is designed to hear and analyze. We can distinguish a single vice out of many in even a noisy environment, which is one of the main design challenges for speech recognition. It has always been a challenge for the computer to understand human voices or how the syntactic structure of a sentence constitutes a meaning. Since the advent of the first speech recognition software in 1970’s, the industry has come a long way where we now have digital assistants with a personality known as Siri.

Speech recognition is actively deployed in commonplace areas ranging from cars, TV’s, phones, etc. In most of today’s new car models users speak to the console system to play music or search for a place over maps. Manufacturers who have been using this technology include but are not limited to Ford, GM, Mercedes, BMW.

Voice recognition has been integrated into operating systems including iOS, Android, Windows, Mac OS, and also forms a basis of Google’s search engine where users could speak the search query. Nuance and Google are the dominating players in the voice recognition field. The technology developed for products by these big companies is being implemented in mainstream areas.

We outline a few examples which when associated with business propositions help us find new domains into how intuitive technology has become today to propel the success of a company.

Contact centers have been using voice recognition systems for over a decade now, resulting in greater customer satisfaction and reduced dropped calls. Speech technology assists customers to find the right person at the right time for their query instead of waiting for long time on the phone.

Smart TV’s are also exploring new domains by taking away the remote from the user wherein the user simply has to say commands in natural language and the system recognizes the needs and performs the necessary operations: changing channels, lowering volume, playing games.

The defense branches of many countries now have user interfaces that recognize full sentences and operate accordingly in combat situations. The industry as a whole has come a long way, yet there are still improvements to be made with the software available today. These challenges include: accent recognition problems, filtering useful information from noise, distortion, and the speed with which results are delivered.