Outlaw: News from SpeechTEK 2008

By Joe Outlaw

Historically, SpeechTEK has been a developer's conference, and I found that to be pretty much true at SpeechTEK 2008 in New York City. There was, perhaps, less talk about new state-of-the-art platforms and VXML than in the past couple of years and more emphasis on the business value of speech-enabled applications. The speech industry is maturing and the focus has moved beyond proving that speech technology is ready to deploy, to bringing down the complexity and cost of deployments. Announcements from Genesys and Nexidia exemplify the new movement .

Genesys announced the availability of the latest version of its Genesys Voice Platform (GVP) release 8. Release 8 is the first fully converged version of its voice platform, combining the best of the acquired VoiceGenie platform and the previous GVP releases. Among the enhancements in GVP 8 are: increased scale, tighter integration with the Genesys contact center suite and an enhanced development environment. Applications written for either the VoiceGenie platform or the previous GVP release will operate on the new GVP 8. In addition to making the Eclipse-based applications development environment more visual and intuitive, Genesys announced they are making steady progress toward making it the development environment for the full Genesys Suite.

Nexidia announced the latest version of its speech analytics solution, the Nexidia Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) 7.0.  ESI 7.0 brings improvements in performance, scalability and usability. As mentioned above about GVP 8, ESI 7.0 is more visual and intuitive than previous versions and supports new dashboards for more quickly identifying trends and anomalies in contact center-customer interactions. Nexidia also announced Quickstart libraries of customizable pre-defined search routines that both speeds the creation and lowers the cost of speech searches. Nexidia has created Quickstart libraries for regulatory compliance, competitive strategy and business process improvement.

Case Studies Presentated at SpeechTEK

Boston Medical Center deployed a speech-based application for monitoring the health of patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and obesity. The over-the-telephone speech recognition application running on the Envox 7 platform conducts patient interviews to determine their condition, and then provides information, advice and coaching. The capability to monitor patients over-the-telephone instead of in an office visit enables more frequent monitoring and makes recommendations more affordable and less  strenuous and stressful for patients.

AAA of Washington state is Washington's largest emergency road service provider, insurance provider and travel agency.  It supports its one million members through its 350-person contact center. Recently it invested in a new voice recording system from Verint Witness Actionable Solutions (WAS) and also began to use the speech analytics functionality of the Impact 360 suite. 

Like many other contact centers, in addition to system reports, it gathers anecdotal insights into how the center is operating from its agents and supervisors. Often these informal insights are enough to find and correct problems. AAA Washington found the value of adding a more scientific approach with speech analytics. Verint WAS's speech analytics is now being used to analyze the center's recorded interactions with its members. So far, it has found root causes for spikes in call volumes, long duration calls and occasionally, agent misbehavior. In addition to finding hidden center inefficiencies or root causes of member dissatisfaction, the analytics application has provided detailed support for anecdotally reported issues, which has been useful to gain management support necessary to fix the issues. 

SpeechTEK: The Bottom Line

Having tracked speech technology's application for customer contact and attended speech conferences for more than 10 years, I conclude that:

• Speech technology is ready for deployment in support of enterprise businesses.
• IVR and voice portal platforms have become reliable, scalable and affordable and, if not completely based on industry standard hardware and software, much less proprietary than in the past.
• Application languages and development environments have become more standards-based, intuitive and accessible.
• Actual speech-enabled application development, while steadily improving, can still be as much art as science.
• The cost of custom speech-enabled application development and support, while gradually decreasing, is still relatively high.
• Both the number of speech-enabled application developers and the variety of industry-specific applications are growing steadily.

These are all signs of a healthy growing industry; good for the industry -- good for its customers.

Joe Outlaw is President and Chief Analyst of Outlaw Research, a firm that provides results-oriented analysis and consulting of the customer contact marketplace.  The objective of Outlaw Research is building a community around the leading edges of customer contact -- the advanced strategies early-adopter companies are applying and the technologies and vendors they are working with.  He can be found at http://www.outlawresearch.com [1]