IVR industry is going to reach its forecasted value of almost 21 billion dollars in 2015, latest research shows. Moreover, companies that are seeking for an IVR solution prefer solutions with speech recognition technology, as it helps businesses to provide more effective self-service options and cut operational costs at the same time.
IVR speech recognition technology is a fundamental improvement compared to legacy DTMF technology that is still the only way to provide self-service for most call centers all over the globe – due to both high costs of voice recognition system and lack of knowledge.
The huge growth of speech technological services in the past few years has spread from just conventional corporate uses to everyday uses by everyday citizens. Mobile phone manufacturers have recognized the need and have offered new services applications. These include voice recognition services like voice-dialing, speech-enabled GPS navigation, and other voice-powered applications such as auto-dictation, and voice search as stated in the press release. Because of this, network operators and device manufacturers are revolutionizing innovations in the area of voice- based products and services.
Voice recognition is no more a corporate use feature only, more and more people start using it to ease everyday operations, such as searching for information in the Internet, using GPS services, using voice-operated applications, and so on. This makes developers invest more in speech recognition technology as it shows great potential for both personal and business use, and especially for further integration with AI technologies.
Even though the recession is going to speed up, speech recognition technologies are conquering even more beneficial positions on the market as cost-saving solutions which help to free human resources for tasks that really require human touch while automatic elementary customer service processes.
For example, Automated Speech Recognition Systems (ASR) saves about 50 percent of costs spent on service agents just because it plays a role of virtual agent that can handle customer requests and help customers complete tasks and complete actions without any human intervention.
European Union and US market are dominating world’s speech recognition technology market as the main consumers of voice recognition technologies. The situation isn’t going to change, yet Indian and other Asian and African countries are going to adopt such technologies in the near future.
Voice recognition technologies aren’t limited to use of IVR systems only – they also include such solutions as text-to-speech translation and voice identification solutions as a type of biometrics used to identify users in a few seconds and with higher accuracy than other identification technologies can do it. The further development of the technology is focused on improving the accuracy of voice recognition to make customer interactions closer to what they are in the case of human-to-human interaction.