Articles

Voice Biometrics Community Update – June 20, 2007

As evidenced in the news items listed below, “buy-side” interest in voice biometrics and speaker verification is on the rise. Collectively, these announcements point to increasing momentum for the voice biometrics sector as requests for information on speaker verification projects have accelerated measurably in recent weeks. The next sign of a maturing market will be achieved when these partnerships and pilot installations evolve into larger, revenue-generating, customer-facing deployments.

Introducing Voice Biometrics Conference 2007

In spite of recent recognition, voice biometric-based authentication, identification and verification remains an under-appreciated phenomenon. That’s why Opus Research is organizing a new event with a strong focus on voice biometrics as a cost-effective and efficacious candidate for strong authentication deployments. It’s time for the primary stakeholders on the enterprise side – ranging from enterprise IT, security specialists and customer care executives to meet the companies that are constructing voice biometric-based solutions.

iPhone Lacks Conversational Aspects

iPhone may be a tour-de-force for the touchscreen, but it’s inexplicably odd to introduce a new smartphone with so few speech-based features. I can hardly express how profoundly disappointed I am that this shiny, new thing – the first must-have product since Nintendo’s Wii – has less voice processing than Tickle-Me Elmo.

Conversations on Mobile Search

In a vaudevillian display of man versus machine at last week’s Conversations customer and partner event in Orlando, Florida, Nuance effectively demonstrated speech recognition as the most efficient and “intuitive” interface for wireless phones. By outpacing the world’s fastest text messenger, Nuance showcased the potential in speech-enabled mobile search [SEMS] – a critical competitive battleground that includes the Internet heavyweights (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL) and represents the next “disruptive” opportunity. With billions at stake, there are opportunities for first movers to differentiate and adopt go-to-market strategies with voice as the interface or a key component of a mobile-search offering.

CRM 2.0: Conversational Relationship Management

Outsourcers of phone-based customer care are not selling technology; they’re selling results. It is called “conversational relationship management” and maintains a connection between a company and its customers for purposes such as sales, retention, up-selling or trouble resolution.

Review of SpeechTek 2006: In Plain English

The automated speech community’s flagship event led off with a keynote by Paul English, where he provided a prescriptive list of improvements that could be made to the user experience. He argued this would be more empowering to callers – more humanizing and less humiliating. His efforts have induced two leading technology providers – Microsoft and Nuance – to join GetHuman.com in an effort to produce a published “standard” of the practices that go into producing a user experience that is gratifying for the caller. But automated speech technologies represent only a small fraction of caller frustration with today’s call centers.

Get Ready for This Year’s VOX Conference

The drive to use IP infrastructure for a broader variety of distributed applications is occurring simultaneously with a general move to use resources around the globe to support self-service. As a result, outsourced self-service is enjoying revenue growth that exceeds speech automation, in general. The factors driving that growth are the topic of Vox 2006, which will be held in NYC on August 7, the first day of SpeechTek 2006.