Speech-to-text technology remains one of the most valuable solutions for contact centers.
To create powerful chatbots and self-service solutions, deliver personalized experiences, and capture insights into the customer journey, companies need to be able to leverage the huge volumes of voice data they collect every day. Speech-to-text technologies are evolving into broader Speech AI systems, a full AI stack that empowers brands to rapidly transcribe conversations, automatically recognize customer voices, and even build intuitive apps.
As the demand for streamlined, efficient, and personalized customer experiences continues to increase, Speech AI systems are quickly emerging as an essential resource for enhancing the value of customer experience applications.
Introducing Speech-to-Text APIs
From a broad perspective, speech-to-text technology allows companies to automatically translate spoken words into written text. This tech has been a fundamental part of the contact center since the 1950s, growing ever-more advanced with the introduction of new AI models.
Today, a Speech AI system can help organizations create everything from intuitive IVR workflows to self-service experiences, generative AI chatbots, and robust training programs. What’s more, these tools ensure businesses can benefit from full visibility into their conversational data, allowing for more intelligent decision making and business growth.
“90% of contact centers handle calls more efficiently after implementing a Conversation AI tool. If companies aren’t prioritizing building with Speech AI and generative AI now, they’re going to rapidly lose market share to those that do,” explains Dylan Fox, Founder and CEO at AssemblyAI.
Speech-to-text APIs, or “application programming interfaces,” set the foundation to bring the power of cutting-edge AI summarization, transcription, and speech recognition tools to existing business apps and workflows through a complete Speech AI ecosystem.
With APIs, companies don’t have to purchase a brand-new contact center platform or integrate their tools with another service. Instead, they can infuse their existing toolkits with state-of-the-art models and algorithms.
How Speech-to-Text APIs and Speech AI Enhance CX Apps
Speech AI for business owners offers companies freedom to enhance and adapt their CX strategies. With APIs, any conversational workflow can be enhanced with AI and speech recognition tools, without the need for extensive development.
However, once they’re embedded into CX apps, these APIs also deliver a host of additional benefits, such as:
1. Enhancing Business Intelligence
To deliver an excellent and consistent customer experience to every consumer, companies need to collect as much information as possible. The more data a business has about a customer’s journey, the touchpoints they use, and their sentiment throughout a conversation, the easier it is to build unforgettable experiences for everyone.
AI models built on top of transcribed conversational data, such as AI summarization models, can make it easier to collect valuable insights from huge volumes of data. These summaries can even make it easier to flag changes in conversational tone and sentiment, throughout a customer journey. Additional Speech AI models can also identify key action items, topics, and areas of insight.
With speech-to-text APIs and Speech AI, businesses can gather more insightful information from customer discussions, and even use that data to create FAQs, guides, and resources for teams.
2. Improving Quality Assurance
Speech-to-text transcriptions and AI summaries don’t just provide businesses with insights into the customer journey and common conversational topics. They can also help supervisors and business managers to review the performance of their team members.
Managers can use AI insights to review a call in a fraction of the time of a manual overview. Plus, they can quickly pinpoint trends that could indicate a need for additional training or support for specific employees. Speech-to-text and Speech AI solutions can even help to improve business compliance.
APIs can be used to rapidly redact personally identifiable information from transcripts and summaries. Plus, it can provide an insight into whether employees are using the right language, asking the right questions, and treating customers with respect.
“Speech AI can rapidly speed up QA by automating a previously manual process. Plus, the automation process reduces the potential for human error, increasing QA accuracy and utility,” says Prachie Banthia, VP of Product at AssemblyAI.
3. Optimizing Customer Interactions
Speech AI in customer experience apps can improve interactions and boost customer satisfaction in a variety of ways. First, AI summarization and transcription models can eliminate repetitive tasks for agents, such as note-taking.
This limits the amount of multitasking team members need to do in calls, ensuring agents can fully engage with the customer, and deliver an exceptional experience. Representatives can even use summaries of conversations to draft follow-up emails and messages relevant to the customer.
Speech AI can also integrate with a CRM to upload valuable insights , giving agents more insights to work with when personalizing future interactions.
4. Building Better Self-Service Solutions
Building state-of-the-art AI assistants and chatbots requires a huge amount of data. Generative AI solutions in particular require access to huge volumes of conversational information, to ensure they can respond to customer queries accurately, and in the right tone of voice.
With speech-to-text APIs built into CX apps, companies can collect more of the valuable information they need to develop intuitive AI solutions. Transcripts can be fed into chatbots and generative AI tools, to provide them with more insights into the unique needs of each customer segment.
Companies can even use this data to create apps capable of delivering more personalized and relevant service to customers in search of assistance with sales, troubleshooting, and other topics.
5. Supporting Collaborative Work
As consumers continue to embrace self-service solutions to solve common and simple problems, the issues passed over to contact center agents are growing more complex. In some cases, team members may need to access the assistance of various subject matter experts when solving a problem.
Speech-to-text tools and summarization APIs can help to ensure agents can collaborate quickly and effectively when supporting customers. They allow business users to rapidly share contextual information with colleagues, helping staff to work together efficiently.
Teams can even use the information collected by Speech AI systems to craft new strategies for customer service, based on customer attitudes, conversation topics, and common complaints.
6. Improving Employee Performance
Adding speech-to-text APIs into a CX application doesn’t just positively impact customer experience, it can also make a significant difference to employee productivity and engagement.
Speech-to-text APIs in a CX tool can provide back-end guidance to team members, based on accurate transcriptions of conversations. Additional Speech AI models can then examine keywords and other data in a conversation, and then use those insights to deliver next-best-action guidance and coaching.
The more conversational data a company feeds into its coaching tools, the more advanced, and valuable they’ll become over time. Additionally, Speech AI systems can help companies gather more of the data they need to inform their wider employee development strategies.
The Power of Speech AI in CX
A Speech AI system gives businesses in the customer experience landscape a unique opportunity to improve both customer and employee satisfaction scores. With this AI technology, companies can analyze data more effectively, automate repetitive tasks, and even deliver better coaching to team members.
What’s more, the flexibility of application programming interfaces ensures businesses don’t have to rip and replace their tech stack to start leveraging the benefits. With APIs like the AI summarization models from AssemblyAI, any company can add text-to-speech functionality into their existing apps, workflows, and contact center tools.