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In the not too distant future, you will be able to sit back in a chair, relax and order your computer to do various tasks for you without touching a thing. Advanced speech recognition technology is becoming more efficient and one day will be an integral part of all technology. You may be asking yourself, what about SIRI or products like Dragon Naturally Speaking? While those are good examples of the beginning evolution of the technology, if you have ever used either product you know they have faults. While not by any means perfect, the advances in the field of voice recognition are extremely impressive. Many Fortune 500 companies utilize these features via IVR services that you have most likely spoken to & interacted with. This call center industry has truly been the first to embrace the speech regulation technology and integrate it into their way of business.
There are two types of speech recognition software and each is designed for different purposes. Speaker-dep endent speech recognition software is one of the most useful applications. This application is used to convert speeches to readable texts. Speaker-dependent speech recognition programs are embedded with various word processors and e-mail programs. You can enable this speech recognition software by speaking through the microphone. This allows you to make the speech engine type the spoken words in a word processor. The method in which you speak and pronounce words coupled your rate of speech, tone of the voice, and inflection will be recognized by the software. These are factors that differ for every person; hence speaker-dependent speech recognition programs require training to comprehend your way of talking. The user needs to read few pages of scripts pre-installed in the program to familiarize the software with your voice. When you are done with the set up, the software is ready to follow your verbal commands.
You can say commands, such as "Open word", and your comput er will open the word processor for you. You can tell your computer what you want to type in the word file and say "save" to save the file. Your e-mail programs would wait for your verbal command to open up and draft e-mails for you. To ensure accuracy, you need to edit the document manually after the speech engine does its job.
Speaker-independent speech recognition software is another type of automatic voice recognition programs that are commonly used in IVRs and have more answering service type applications. Speaker-independent speech recognition programs do not require any sort of training, but it's less efficient than the Speaker-dependent applications. You can record words in these applications and program the speaker-dependent applications to perform particular tasks if someone initiated action based on hits to the recorded words. Take the example of calling a company and asking the computer to transfer the call to a person's by saying their last name (sometimes called a dial by name directory). Once you say the name, the speech engine goes through the records and check if such a person works in the organization. If the record matches, the call is transferred to the corresponding person. This whole IVR process is carried out using speaker-independent speech recognition programs.
Speech recognition programs are not new in the market but these applications were not accurate enough to be useful. Accuracy and speed are the two parameters that speech recognition programs are judged on. Today's speech recognition is trained on understanding the words you say, not the meaning of those words. Hence, if you fail to pronounce words as they are recorded in the system, these programs would not recognize what you are saying. So, if you wanted to speak with an operator and used the term "agent" instead, if the word "agent" was not associated with the word "operator", the call would not transfer.
The rate in which you speak is a key f actor in using these applications as well. You need to wait until your program recognizes your first word before you say the next. Today several companies have introduced speech recognition programs that are capable of comprehending human voice with commendable accuracy.
This technology although amazing, is still in its infancy. Future advances in speech recognition will become a powerful tool with unlimited potential.
For more information about technology used in the call center industry, please visit the Office Phone Outsourcing website. Other blog posts include will SIP replace VoIP the ever important how to manage a call center correctly.