The use of voice for communication has gone through an evolution over the past decade, particularly with the introduction of digital assistants that can be summoned on command.
In modern business, voice technology continues to be an essential part of the way customers interact with brands, especially in the contact centre. For example, a contact center can use state-of-the-art voice technology with interactive voice responses (IVR) to better understand why someone is calling, to determine if the caller is getting irate, and flag those calls to improve the customer support experience.
According to LumenVox Founder and CEO, Edward Miller, despite these recent developments, the value of the voice technology market has only scratched the surface of use cases that can be achieved with the power of the spoken word.
“As we are speaking now, you can hear in my voice, with reasonable assurance, that it’s a male voice, and you probably have an idea that I’m a little bit older,” said Miller. “Our voices contain a significant amount of metadata, which can be used to discern a myriad of things about us.”
“Even in the early days of speech technology, speech-enabling companies like LumenVox had the ability to discern information about a speaker, but it simply wasn’t revealed. These capabilities exist in voice technology today and are only now being applied to improve customer experiences”
“But there is also so much more to come. We are seeing the application of voice capabilities for mitigating deepfake technology and fraud detection, for understanding universal dialect detection, for serving discreet network architectures and hybrid environments, and for use in areas of data analytics and predictive analyses.”
Low Code/No Code
We can utilise the information stored within our voices in many ways, with voice assistants and IVRs, for example. But businesses will use the voice metadata in new and different ways depending on the services they provide.
A shining example of voice technology innovation across the B2B industry is the trend of “low code/no code” platforms proliferating in the market now and knocking down the barriers to the adoption of new speech-enabled applications. With low code/no code platforms, businesses can enable their own applications using tools and ready-made components to create web and mobile applications. The use of modular speech technology through a universal API will be a central part of the growth of these new voice applications.
“Together with our customers, we’re on the forefront of making speech technology a core part of this new group of innovative low code/no code solutions,” said Miller.
“These solutions hit a sweet spot for enterprises that are between building new applications using their own code and pre-built applications using tools and external components”
“Low code/no code applications provide an easier way for “citizen developers”, such as business analysts, office administrators and small businesses to create applications. Businesses can create these solutions quickly, often at a lower cost than applications requiring dedicated software developers. Our customers that provide access to robust tools and technology – including high performing speech technology – are very well poised to serve this trend.”
According to the Harvard Business Review, low code/no code development is relinquished “to users instead of professional system developers. With point-and-click or pull-down menu interfaces, users can usually design and implement their individual or departmental systems in a few hours. The software may also have a conversational or search interface. Few, if any, programming skills are required.”
Low-code/no-code solutions act as building blocks to create the voice-enabled applications businesses want. “We’re right at the very forefront of this exciting trend,” Miller says. “Forward-thinking companies are embracing the low code/no code method, which allows them to pick a variety of different platforms to which they can create unique applications. Programmatically, or in the software itself, it has become easier for enterprises to develop solutions than it was in the past.”
LumenVox
At the heart of LumenVox’s business is its ability to provide enabling technology to solution providers. Using the example of its work with Twilio, Miller points the way to what is possible with a LumenVox partnership.
“As-a-Service companies want our technology within their hosted environment,” says Miller.
“When you are utilizing voice technology at scale, performance, accuracy, and time-to-market is critical. Our technology must listen to the audio, understand what is being said and provide direction to the application in under a second”
Miller concludes, “What we do for our customers is take the components of our core technology and wrap them in containers and microservices so that our customers can install them natively in their platforms. A broad array of hosting organizations are using LumenVox’s modular portfolio of software as central parts of their technology. People in all corners of the industry are approaching us as they observe the value of easily plugging in our engine to effectively serve their customers.”
