Let me qualify this post by admitting that I was unable to attend most of the tracks at this year’s SpeehTEK NYC conference. That said, I want to give well-deserved kudos to the conference organizers for creating a venue that brought together two closely adjacent, but largely separate communities of technology vendors: Speech Specialists and CRM Mavens. The fact that impressed me most at this year’s SpeechTEK was that speech processing technologies – meaning core automated speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis and even my pet interest voice biometric-based speaker identification or authentication – were not front and center.

Instead of “speech” the center of gravity has decidedly moved toward creating the optimal multimodal customer experience. Thus the idea of Avaya re-naming its long-standing “Voice Portal” the “Experience Portal” or Microsoft launching a company-wide marketing, development and packaging initiative around the idea of a “Natural User Interface” that includes speech but adds typing, texting, and “gestures” show that speech has a gigantic future – but it is as part of a combination of technologies brought to bear to solve the needs of end-users.

Past SpeechTEK’s were specific to speech. When we talked about standards, it was largely to make ASR recognizers and TTS synthesizers work and play well with one another. Likewise, analytics were “speech analytics” put into play to find the faults in spoken dialogues or root cause for abandoning an endless session inside an IVR. ADEs (Application Development Environments) governed “dialogue modules” or reusable code to create better speech-based interactions. You get the idea. Now, in the spirit of RC (Recombinant Communications) developers are retaining the best of their speech-based experience while leveraging their investment in the logic and workflow encased in their Web sites and mobile apps.

SpeechTEK made it evident that, while speech processing remains an important and necessary resource for today’s self-service and assisted service applications, we’re well beyond such a one-dimensional treatment of reality. User Experience is the rightful center of attention and the speech community has come around to recognize that it cannot address the full spectrum of user options by itself. That’s why most of the briefings we took at SpeechTEK addressed how vendors are addressing the demand for “cross-channel” and “multimodal” communications.

More details in next week’s advisory on “Automated Speech in the Multimodal World”. So many opportunities… So much time!

Categories: Articles

Tags: Speech recognition, speech analytics, Contact Center, IVR, Recombinant Communications