Speech recognition is starting to take off

Last week, holiday firm First Choice joined the growing number of UK businesses to introduce a speech recognition system.

The system, at the company’s customer contact centre in Manchester, handles 600 calls a day, dealing with the most common enquiries about balances owed on holidays, making payments and checking on ticket status.

First Choice is following a slow-moving trend towards the use of speech recognition, with UK companies including Powergen, British Airways, Lloyds TSB, Barclays and Odeon all adopting similar systems.

But getting the technology to this point has been difficult, says Ovum analyst David Bradshaw.

‘The potential for speech recognition was recognised fairly early, but over the past 15 years it has been praised to the heights and damned for its ineffectiveness in more or less equal measure,’ he said.

‘Now a lot of people are simply using it, piloting it and quietly getting on with making it work. So it is beginning to enter the mainstream.’

Sutton and East Surrey Water is using the technology to answer a growing range of customer enquiries. Customer accounts consultant Ken Newman says the speech recognition system was used successfully by customers for 30,000 payments last year – about 20 per cent of the calls the utility firm received.

‘We started off with just card payment facilities: customers went through to the speech recognition system, which took spoken details of their card and the payment they wanted to make,’ he said.

‘The system then passed through the customer’s file, which can be loaded directly into our payments infrastructure.’

Sutton and East Surrey Water says the speech recognition project has been a huge success.

But Ovum’s Bradshaw says this sort of triumph is the result of a mixture of previous trial and error, and a shift in the way modern speech recognition works.

‘Previously you had to have a large sample of speakers speaking the words that you wanted to be recognised. Now speech recognition systems take words and break them down into unique elements of sound, called phonemes,’ he said.

‘There are also more people now who understand how to build these systems in a way that makes it easy for customers to get to what they want to do.’

With many of the problems that dogged speech recognition in the past apparently fixed, the technology seems set for a brighter future.

Gartner analyst Steve Cramoysan expects steady, rather than spectacular, growth.

‘One thing that may push things along faster is Google, which is talking about introducing voice search over mobile phones,’ he said.

‘If that happens, it will take this technology down a whole new high-profile track.’

Speech recognition

• UK companies are increasingly using speech recognition.
• The systems improve call centre efficiency by handling simple enquiries and transactions.
• Analyst Datamonitor calculates the international speech recognition market will grow to $2.7bn (£1.5bn) by 2009.