The latest poll, out by Speechmatics, reveals the sentiment of industry professionals across the UK, Europe, the US, Asia, and Australia when it comes to voice technology like the use of voice bots, transcription, voice assistants, home appliances, wearables, automotive, captioning, compliance, and analytics.
Among the report’s key findings – the top two voice applications slated to have the greatest commercial impact in 2020 are customer experience at 36 percent, and home automation at 34 percent. Speechmatics’ report points out other chief points of interest.
According to respondents, they belive data security, privacy, AI-biases, and commercial monopolies are the greatest risks to speech technology moving forward. The company uncovered a lot more insights in its recent report, so let’s dig right in and explore more of its key findings.
The Issue of Data Security Remains of High Concern
Data security is so essential, a whooping ninety-three percent of those surveyed said it will remain a priority. Alex Fleming, Product Marketing Manager, Speechmatics, told UC Today in a recent interview, these challenges, while valid, can be overcome with on-premises deployments that operate offline.
Last year, we saw a real need for concern, when companies like Amazon and Google stated they used home devices to listen to conversations so they could enhance UX for IoT devices.
Contact Centers Are Trying to Keep Up
And when it comes to contact centers and fulfilling soaring customer expectations, emerging technologies such as IVR and automatic speech recognition play a fundamental role in guaranteeing the quality of service consumers expect enterprises to provide.
“The key with implementing any emerging technology into your technology stack is making sure it is ready for all the challenges it’ll face”
According to Markets and Markets, they predict the contact center analytics market will grow from $634 million in 2016 to $1,483 million by 2022. Though contact centers have adapted speech analytics technology quite rapidly to stay current, Speechmatics’ report points to something we’ve known for some time – call recording is no longer enough.
“Contact centers have the incentive to leverage voice technologies to optimize their businesses. By capturing, structuring, and analyzing data, enterprise leadership can understand patterns in data and predict future outcomes”
While call recordings often provide a short-term, solution, recordings of audio conversations are difficult to index, he shared. And they aren’t intuitive to search nor do call recordings enable contact center management to make real-time decisions to enhance CX on the spot.
Companies Are Catching on to Benefits of Analytics
Pointing to another principal statistic, Speechmatics found, 50 percent of those surveyed said their company does have a voice strategy. While we have a long way to go to get others to catch up, there’s hope, according to Fleming.
He pointed out, 70 percent of participants said they will consider a voice strategy in the next five years, meaning CX could receive the much-needed boost it deserves in years to come. Want to find out more about Speechmatichs? Check out them out at CCW Berlin at booth E21 and 2020’s Call & Contact Center Expo at stand number 1964.
