Speech Analytics Overview and Market Guide in 2021

Contact centre analytics is a booming market, expected to be worth nearly $1.5 billion by 2022. This is because analysing different aspects of contact centre operations (interactions, agent performance, and overall resource utilisation) can reveal key insights that help to improve CX and boost business outcomes for the entire organisation. One of the emerging areas of analytics implementation is speech analytics – i.e., the ability to convert raw audio from voice into meaningful text and actionable insights.

What is Speech Analytics?

Speech analytics uses a number of AI and statistical analysis techniques to first convert speech to text, classify the text data into structured chunks for processing, and then generate insights. Speech analytics can reveal insights like how the customer is feeling, their likelihood to make a purchase, an agent’s likelihood of properly handling a problematic caller, etc.

In other words, the technology performs cognitive understanding tasks that were previously impossible via machines.

Speech Analytics Market Size

The global speech analytics market in 2020 was valued at $1.5 billion, with a projected growth of 20.2% for the next five years. By 2025, speech analytics will be worth $3.8 billion, propelled by advancements in AI/ML, the need to make data-driven decisions in the wake of the pandemic, and more affordable resources thanks to the cloud.

Interestingly, speech analytics comprises more solution offerings than services. This means that while professional support and managed implementations are definitely a part of speech analytics market activity, customers are primarily engaging in self-managed feature/product subscriptions in partnership with software providers.

Key Market Trends in 2021

• AI, ML, and NLP are evolving at a rapid pace, making speech analytics (especially the speech-to-text conversion component) more accurate
• The pandemic and the switch to remote work has increased demand for automation (e.g., speech analytics for call summarisation) as well as remote performance monitoring (e.g., more accurate feedback from calls)
• Several of the world’s largest contact centre providers like NICE, Genesys, and Verint already offer speech analytics capabilities. More companies are likely to follow suit in 2021-2022.
• Like AI, recent strides in disciplines like psycholinguistics makes it possible to derive extremely meaningful insights from a person’s speech
• The demand for service localisation will fuel the next wave of speech analytics development, inspiring multilingual translation through AI

Key Vendors

Some of the key vendors in speech analytics today are CallMiner, NICE, Clarabridge, Verint, and Invoca. Forrester ranks these companies as Leaders and Strong Performers. Tether, Cogito, Genesys, and Mattersight are classified as Contenders, while Aspect and OpenText make up the rear as challengers.

The speech analytics vendor landscape is extremely varied ranging from specialists like CallMiner to 360-degree contact centre solutions like the ones by Genesys and NICE. Some vendors like OpenText apply the technology solely in the context of customer feedback.

Future Forecasts

Given these bullish conditions, one can expect steady growth in speech analytics demand, with a strong push into the cloud and a lot of activity from CX and contact centre companies.