The worldÂ’s leading speech recognition companies speak up about the future
The worldÂ’s leading speech recognition companies will speak about the future of the industry at EuropeÂ’s definitive speech recognition event - Voice World Europe 2004.
London, United Kingdom, (PRWEB) March 18, 2004
Nine industry leaders reveal where they see the future of speech recognition in Europe, and which industries will most benefit from future applications.
Mark Erwich, Marketing Director of Scansoft
“In ASR more solutions will be developed and therefore available to market. One example of this is in TTS, where more natural sounding voices will be offered. This will lead to a broader acceptance of speech technology and accelerate the drive for more applications with higher ROI and improved quality, in applications for call centres, for example.
As well as implementing speech technology to help businesses run more effectively, we will see a greater uptake of the technology in consumer goods - mobile devices, in-car navigation, toys and games. The technology will also be increasingly adopted in services and products for the disabled.
The industries that will benefit most from speech applications are those that need to automate any of their time consuming processes. Effectively, any document intensive professions where specific terminology is used, such as medical diagnosis, will witness a greater uptake of the technology.”
Nick Applegarth, Managing Director of Nuance EMEA
“The number of deployed speech applications in Europe has risen considerably in the past two years - Nuance alone has over 200 companies using its technology in customer-facing activities. The viral effect will be increased confidence in the technology and a greater understanding of what speech can do for a business.
The future will see increased adoption by telecoms operators. Information services such as traffic updates, weather reports, horoscope readings and sports results will appear throughout Europe - like they have in Switzerland, Spain and Italy. History has shown us that when telcos adopt something, it speeds up adoption elsewhere.
The current level of technology still exceeds the demands of today and tomorrow, but continued investment in R&D will yield greater accuracy and more human text-to-speech. Voice verification, already an accurate biometric, will play an increasing role in securing access to sensitive information, or in identifying callers to a call centre.
Mostly, the future will be about ensuring that the technology enhances a caller's experience - providing a better experience than touch-tone, and matching, if not beating, the experience with a human operator.”
Peter Kelly, President of Enterprise Networks for Nortel Networks, EMEA
“The future for the European voice industry is in convergence; our definitions of the ‘voice industry’ and ‘voice applications’ need to change. At Nortel Networks, convergence means more than just Voice over IP. It is about enabling the secure delivery of voice, data, video and applications on wired and wireless networks. Europe, with its leadership in mobile voice technology, is ideally positioned to reap the benefits of this convergence. The converged future provides sustainable cost reductions for both service providers and enterprises. Convergence lowers capital and operating costs by bringing separate voice and data networks into a single, multiservice network. It will raise the value of voice service with new applications such as video calling, unified messaging, and Web-enabled multimedia call centres. With multiple services available on a single customer link, providers have lots of opportunities to bundle, cross-sell, and up sell services. Initially organisations with a geographically diverse workforce and those that rely on delivering immediate customer contact points will see, and are already beginning to see, the benefits. However, new applications such as collaboration and unified messaging are going to enable all of us, wherever we happen to be and in whatever industry, to team more effectively and be more productive.”
Eric Giler, President of Brooktrout Technology
“We see the European voice industry going through a significant evolution over the next few years. Voice applications have been used predominantly in messaging and IVR applications directly connected to telephone switches. The shift we see occurring is voice applications moving beyond the telephony/switch-centric locus where they began, out into more general purpose IT-centric applications centered around business process automation. One example of this would be a sales force automation application that uses speech as the human interface to the CRM system. Sales reps call into the CRM system and use speech to access customer information, provide quotes, or to transfer connect to their contact's phone.
Developing countries with little legacy infrastructure, such as those in Eastern Europe, may be the most likely to adopt the newest voice and speech technologies and approaches, especially as the penetration of mobile phones supplants pulse phones. The industries that will benefit the most from this shift are the ones with the greatest number of customer interactions including financial services, healthcare, and retail. But over time, as voice applications become speech-enabled and integrated with standard business processes, manufacturing and other industries will follow.”
Rosanna Duce, Vice President of Loquendo
“There are some cultural/geographic differences that I see driving voice innovation in Europe the need for multi-lingual applications, high diffusion of mobile phones, slow internet penetration rate and a small audience for many voice applications.
Most Europeans almost always have a telephone on their person. This makes an opportunity for speech-enabled services to deliver instant information access. The mobile phones become an ideal device for accessing speech-services—always available and easy to use. European voice applications need to support multiple languages to reach both tourists and business people.
Another challenge is that many European voice applications will be serving smaller audiences. This has driven Loquendo to actively work to reduce the cost structure for voice application development. We have placed significant effort in our speech synthesis technology, trying to reach lifelike quality with our text-to-speech, so applications can invest less in costly pre-records.”
John McCready, VP of Marketing of Phonetic Systems
“Businesses in Europe are facing a challenge. With a growing need to serve an ever-expanding amount of customer interactions via the telephone, businesses are looking towards solutions to help them grow their businesses instead of just trying to keep up. Over the next 1-3 years, Europe will see tremendous growth with speech recognition applications. Speech will be driven more into the mainstream by delivering true business value to enterprises that increases customer satisfaction and productivity while reducing costs.
While speech offers solutions across all industries, there are particular vertical industries like banking and healthcare that will lead the way in leveraging speech because of their large customer base and their need to offer secure 24x7 automated services in a flexible and personalised manner.”
Brough Turner, Senior VP of Technology of NMS Communications
“The European voice industry will be IP-driven, with small - and mid-sized businesses across all industries, in particular, reaping the benefits of speech applications. Many of these applications are finally becoming scalable, flexible and affordable for SMEs, integrate well with existing IT infrastructure, and are increasingly available on a hosted or outsourced basis. Most importantly, these applications represent solid ROI and lower total cost of ownership. As a result, SMEs will be able to leverage technology to improve operations and employee productivity, and strengthen and deepen relationships with customers and partners. Chief among these business improvement tools will be applications involving ASR and TTS in sophisticated yet easy-to-use applications like customer self-service. And, they will all be IP-based, reflective of the value of that technology to businesses of any size.”
Mike Matthews, Head of Product Marketing of Aculab
“The industry is heading towards consolidation. Core technology and the companies producing it will continue to merge and partner as the major technical challenges toward acceptable success rates have been overcome. Where the industry will blossom, and its focus should be, is through encouraging and educating the channel where developers and integrators will react and deliver innovative application ideas. We will also see price erosion continuing to a point of viability - where the price of TTS and ASR per channel isn't an objection or barrier to market entry.
A generation of people expecting self-service is happening, dialogues are improving, users will be happier to deal with enquiries and navigate themselves to empowerment. Consider this in a European context and the number of languages supported by enabling technology and you have a very cost effective means of serving multi-cultural/lingual customer bases. In particular, when targeting the leisure and travel sectors.”
Brendan Treacy, CEO of Vicorp
“We see the voice industry heading towards all of the following:
· Strong growth in managed voice services, especially for interactive TV, multi-media and high volume content management and delivery.
· Increased personalisation of services spearheaded by self-management of hosted enterprise services.
· Richer frameworks and tool suites for end-to-end lifecycle management of voice services.
· Voice browsers, media servers and application servers continuing trend towards commodity pricing with applications and application enablers increasing in importance.
· Component based services will become more readily available and technology to help with service packaging will be in demand.
· Market segmentation will get much more sophisticated, driven by content and new media options.
Overall we think combined voice and data services will become commonplace and the distribution and presentation of content will combine with voice at a steady rate. But voice will continue to grow and will stay as the dominant means of communication.”
Voice World Europe 2004 will take place on 4th – 6th May at Olympia Conference Centre, London, UK. The full conference programme, exhibitor list and event updates are available at www. voice-world. com
ENDS -
ABOUT VOICE WORLD EUROPE 2004
The conference features case studies from many European organisations that have employed speech solutions, including Real Madrid FC, Morgan Stanley, British Airways, Lufthansa, and Lastminute. com.
The Voice World exhibition, running alongside the conference, provides solution providers with a platform to launch new products, present live demonstrations and showcase their latest applications.
ABOUT TERRAPINN
Terrapinn, the organiser of the annual Voice World Europe event is an international business media company. Our products are trade exhibitions, conferences, training solutions and online publishing. Terrapinn owns a portfolio of leading B2B brands.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Jaimie Brook
Senior Marketing Manager
Terrapinn Ltd
Tel: +44 (0)20 7242 1548
Fax: +44 (0)20 7242 1508
Email: jaimie. brook@terrapinn. com
