Capita acquires Salmat Speech Solutions

Business processing and outsourcing firm Capita has acquired customer communications solution provider Salmat Speech Solutions' UK operations as part of its ongoing investment in contact centres.

Salmat Speech Solutions is headquartered in Australia and delivers natural language voice recognition and voice biometric technologies.

Salmat's technology is underpinned by components that include speech recognisers, which turn human speech into text; text-to-speech engines, which create speech from text; and voice biometric engines, which verify the identity of a person using characteristics of their voice.

Simon Furber, head of unified communications and contact centres at Capita, explained that acquiring Salmat Speech Solutions is part of a wider strategy.

"We announced a number of acquisitions last year, showing a huge investment in the contact centre," he said.

"This is both from a technology point of view, evidenced by the acquisition of Bristol-based Call Centre Technology last May, and operationally, [evidenced] by the acquisition of Ventura and Vertex [customer contact centre service providers].

"This acquisition further expands our capability in the contact centre."

Furber went on to say that the acquisition will benefit both internal and external customers.

"External customer satisfaction can be significantly improved by this technology, as it means the caller will be directed to the right person automatically. By using biometric technology, there is a more robust and efficient verification identity, which is key in the financial and public sectors," he concluded.