Data Voice Solutions

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

Speech recognition technologies have typically been deployed to achieve ROI and the ROI has been derived from labor cost savings such as enabling a natural interface for people to interact with computers compared with the much more expensive option of interacting with other people. The technology has been supplanting DTMF a.k.a. TouchTone (News - Alert)  IVR for more complex exchanges that have led callers to ‘zero-out’ to live contact center agents.

 

Microsoft is reportedly rolling out solutions, which capture and utilize the benefits of speech recognition not only down this traditional avenue, but also in new and efficiency-gaining and safety-improving directions such as controlling hardware and software more effectively. To these ends, it has tasked its new Speech at Microsoft team to create an advanced speech platform, one that spans cloud-based voice services, mobile phones and world-class servers for enterprise customers - one that will make talking to a computer may soon be as natural as using a mouse.

 

The Speech at Microsoft Group, formed after Microsoft’s acquisition of Tellme (News - Alert) Networks in 2007 that married Microsoft’s speech development team with Tellme’s team, taps into a sophisticated speech-recognition technology and Web speech engine that has been under development for more than a decade. This is leading to a wave of voice-enabled products promising easier and faster interactions.

 

The group runs the hosted/cloud-based Tellme platform, which it said is the world’s largest voice platform based on the VoiceXML (News - Alert) standard, managing more than six million calls every day.

 

“Voice is the new touch,” said Zig Serafin (News - Alert), general manager of the Speech at Microsoft group, in a statement. “It’s the natural evolution from keyboards and touch screens. Today, speech is rapidly becoming an expected part of our everyday experience across a variety of devices. Bill Gates (News - Alert) articulated this vision a decade ago, and we’re seeing it happen today.”

 

To that end, Microsoft will launch Exchange Server 2010 at TechEd Europe, which runs Nov. 9–13, in Berlin, Germany. The company said there it will have “one of the most eagerly awaited features” and that is the new Voice Mail Preview, a capability “that is poised to transform the way people retrieve and navigate voice mail.”

 

Using speech-to-text technology, Exchange 2010 automatically sends a text preview of voice mail right to the user’s inbox. Instead of wondering whether the little red light on their phones is signaling an important call, people can scan text previews, right in Outlook, to determine message content and priority.

Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president of Microsoft Exchange, says Voice Mail Preview in Exchange 2010 makes it dramatically easier to visually sift through voice mail on your PC, mobile phone, or any popular Web browser to quickly determine the importance of a call.

 

“For me, this feature is invaluable during meetings or other situations when actually listening to voice mail is not a viable option,” says Jha.

 

Earlier this month the Speech at Microsoft group introduced an enhanced Outbound IVR Service on the Tellme platform to provide proactive customer service. With this service, businesses can provide interactive outbound messages that allow customers to act upon the alerts: to pay a bill, rebook a flight, or schedule delivery for a missed package, for example. The Outbound IVR Service is optimized to work across the phone (call or text), e-mail, instant messaging and the Web to deliver a personalized, efficient experience.

 

 “We are delivering a steady stream of innovations to our platform in order to continue to deliver the best experience for the caller and best performance for the enterprise,” says Jamie Bertasi, senior director for Speech at Microsoft. “By leveraging the power of the cloud and the billions of interactions we see every year, we are able to fine-tune the way companies engage their customers, enabling them to improve customer satisfaction while significantly reducing costs.”

 

The Voice Mail Preview in Exchange 2010 and the Outbound IVR Service follows the release of Talk to Windows 7, which is an improved speech recognition feature in Windows 7, launched last week. This application enables people to control their computer completely by voice or by touch and voice. Using Windows Speech Recognition, people can easily launch applications, access commands and even convert their voice into text in any application that runs on Windows 7. In addition, software developers can tap into these capabilities to enable rich, natural speech interactions between users and Windows-based applications.

 

“By using the power of their voice, people can get their jobs done more efficiently,” says Ian LeGrow, group program manager for the Windows team at Microsoft. “With Windows Speech Recognition, the interactions between people and their computers can be more natural, not just in the future, but starting today.”

 

Microsoft has also come out with Bing for Mobile, a free, on-the-go version of Bing with voice-enabled search. Using this application, people simply speak their search query to retrieve results on their Windows phone. The solution is timely with more jurisdictions limiting smartphone interactions to hands-free, one of the latest being the Canadian province of British Columbia, home of the 2010 Winter Olympics, that lies 2 hours north of Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash. and whose law will be passed in time for the sports spectacle.

 

The Bing 411 service works for any phone. People call 1-800-Bing-411, speak their search, and hear the results or get a text message of addresses, directions and other information for easy access later. Both Bing 411 and the Bing for Mobile application help users safely access important information wherever they may be, when typing on a phone is slow, impossible or inconvenient.

 

Microsoft’s Tellme speech technology is on the newly launched Samsung Intrepid from Sprint. People can speak a search query or dictate a text message. Intrepid users simply press the Tellme button on the phone and say what they want: whether that’s to dial a colleague, text a friend, or search Bing for the nearest hardware store or best happy hour.

 

“When you’re on the go, using only keystrokes to search can be cumbersome, especially if you’re multi-tasking; it takes over 20 strokes of the keypad to find a restaurant on the Web,” said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the Online Services Division at Microsoft, in a statement. “With Bing for Mobile or Bing 411, you simply speak your query to get results quickly, easily and safely. Using your voice to simply ‘say what you want and get it’ helps you do more when you’re in a mobile scenario.”

 

Expect even more speech recognition-based solutions from Microsoft. And for good reason: they save money, time, hassle, provides safety and increases customer satisfaction by making products more user-friendly: all strong expenditure justifications.

 

 “Speech-recognition technology has matured to a level where it’s a primary catalyst for the next wave of innovation in the unified communications space,” said Nancy Jamison, principal analyst with Jamison Consulting, in a statement. “Microsoft’s recent advancements in speech really strike at the heart of what true unified communications is all about: improving the user experience.”