THERE ARE TWO AREAS
in a company which an executive can examine for potential benefits
from voice technology. The first area is daily office routine.
A second area is transactions with customers.
Daily office routine:
Think about the kinds of commands you could give to a computer
that represent things that you really need to do every day. Here
are some examples: "What's the price of my IBM stock?" "get my
Internet mail" "what's the status of the Hong Kong order" "what's
the status of the Lambert case?"
Computers can be trained to listen for these kinds of commands
and deliver the expected results. Off-the-shelf products already
will take dictation and transcribe them into fully formatted letters
without special training.
Customer transactions:
Many businesses have significant interaction with customers
via the telephone. A simple study can often reveal where speech
recognition and speech synthesis approaches can have major bottom
line impact on these transactions and yet keep customer satisfaction
higher than the old annoying "press 1 for service" messages.
Generally, there are no off-the-shelf solutions, but there are
off-the-shelf components which can be assembled into useful solutions.
Solutions in this category have been historically called telephony.
For a good example of how well this could be done for your company,
call this interactive computer demonstration number: (610)-648-2951
(demonstration provided courtesy of UNISYS).
Company web sites can now also be provided with a high degree
of engaging speech assisted interaction.
About accuracy:
Speech recognition has two components: accuracy and fluency.
Accuracy is the aspect of a computer system which allows it to
correctly identify each word you speak as a word it knows. Fluency
is the aspect concerning the range of grammar and vocabulary which
the computer system knows. Both aspects are important, but as
an executive you'll be most comfortable with systems which have
high fluency.
Why? High fluency places fewer demands to memorize special command-and-control
phrases. That means lower training costs and therefore quicker
productivity boost.
Off-the-shelf dictation products have remarkable accuracy but
each vendor incorporates different levels of fluency. Dragon's
NaturallySpeaking currently has the most fluency for command-and-control.
The accuracy and fluency for your own telephony applications can
be made as high as needed in proportion to the return on investment
required.
