Zurich – Rapid change was underway in the patterns of speech tech adoption of leading market players in 2018. While in the minds of many decision-makers speech technologies are still in the hype phase, they have, in fact, reached the plateau of productivity for quite some time. NLP-/NLU-powered solutions are rapidly moving to the mainstream status globally. The speech and voice recognition market was valued at USD 5.15 bn in 2016 and is expected to reach USD 18.30 bn by 2023, at a CAGR of 19.80%, based on some predictions. By 2020, 50% of analytic queries will be generated using searches based on natural-language processing.
For the year 2019, the leading Swiss speech technology provider Spitch identifies seven main trends that will shape and inspire this fast-growing market.
Trend 1: Swiss dialects are given no consideration among global providers – increasing demand in Switzerland
While the global providers of speech technologies give no consideration to Swiss German, there is an increasingly growing demand for solutions that understand Swiss dialects in Switzerland. This trend is pervasive, but has established itself as a best practice in Switzerland only in recent years. Such Spitch solutions are already in productive use at several Swiss companies.
Trend 2: Use of speech technologies - Switzerland is catching up
Although just started, Switzerland is quickly catching up with the US and UK in terms of voice tech adoption rates. A recent survey by Spitch during our webinar for bankers, representing banks of all sizes, showed that over 76% of attendees were either evaluating or planning to offer a voice service soon. 57% of the bankers saw a very high potential in voice biometry.
Trend 3: Omni-channel communication platforms with conversational UIs will drive up sales.
Cost saving and CX improvement are crucial to most contact centres in the financial services, telecoms, and other key industries. The use of speech tech is increasingly regarded as helpful in increasing sales. New imperatives include not just converting voice into business processes, but also enabling bots to handle natural conversations with customers, regardless of the channel. It is one of the most likely directions where the contact centre industry will be heading in 2019-2020.
Trend 4: Voice biometrics as an important success factor
Implementing bespoke solutions based on voice biometrics for customer identification and authentication purposes is not an easy task, especially for smaller-size clients. Implementations require quite a long time due to the need to collect correct voiceprints, setting the right balances of false acceptance and false rejection rates in line with the security requirements and regulatory frameworks, among others. At the same time, cloud-based platform solutions sharing the voiceprints and delivering the identification as a service may help save a tremendous amount of efforts and money. Those businesses that are currently experimenting or have already implemented voice biometrics will be among the future winners.
Trend 5: Externally managed omni-channel interface services
Voice user interfaces will be increasingly offered as a service by external providers, making it possible for customers of any size to experience the advantages of the entire communication platform as part of a trusted provider’s package relatively fast, cheap and easy. This approach will ensure that such services are more affordable to a wide range of smaller businesses.
Trend 6: Voice data becomes completely available to improve analytics.
Voice data is becoming an important part of the big data analytics industry and RegTech (thanks to MiFID II and GDPR, among others) with a potential to not only meet compliance but eventually improve sales through further personalisation. The smart use of voice data will stand behind improved customer retention and, generally, customer experience management (CEM) techniques. “Voice first” optimisation and voice search capabilities are likely to start re-shaping CEM strategies in the growing number of industries starting with telecoms and e-commerce. There we expect agile deployment.
Trend 7: Voice first – the hype is increasingly becoming mainstream
Suppliers start to deliver speech interfaces as the must in their regular offerings. It is crucial to know the client’s business inside-out and be capable of offering solutions that guarantee fast time to market and meaningful business effects for a clearly defined use case. So, domain business leaders, who offer comprehensive solutions for the dedicated customers groups, significantly improve their propositions and increase revenues adding natural speech interfaces there. Spitch experience also shows that an essential addition to mutually beneficial partnerships is offering a set of instruments to enable partners to benefit from the core speech technologies fully.
Spitch AG Overview:
Spitch is an established Swiss provider of solutions in automated speech recognition (ASR), voice user interfaces (VUI) and natural language data analysis. At the heart of Spitch’s mission is the provision of accurate natural language processing as part of artificial intelligence (AI) for improving customer satisfaction and reducing costs. Spitch’s technologies enable the automation of knowledge management, addressing one of the most promising IT‑trends of the near future. In addition to numerous languages offered, Spitch is the first provider of business solutions in the various Swiss dialects. In addition to high accuracy and rich functionality, Spitch also offers flexible, customer-centric models and a tailor-made approach focused on delivering visible business benefits through voice-driven services. The development team of Spitch AG has over 50 years of R&D experience in voice technologies (Spoken Language Technology, SLT), including automatic speech recognition (ASR), voice biometrics (VB), information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). Spitch offers these solutions for platforms of the most widely known manufacturers worldwide, which can also be customized according to customer requirements. The company is headquartered in Zurich. Spitch has offices in Milan and London.
