Intelleca, Nuance conference uncovers the future of speech technology

Voice and contact centre solutions company Intelleca recently held its "Interactions" conference at the Sandton Convention Centre.

Sponsored by one of Intelleca's key partners in this space, leading speech and imaging solutions provider Nuance Communications, the conference focused on improving the customer experience through natural and intuitive speech interactions.

One of the questions posed was whether technology can capture the essence of the personal service relationship. "The service experience starts with identifying and authenticating your customer at the front door, and by so doing, establishing a relationship of mutual trust," says Mike Renzon, CEO of Intelleca. "Personalisation, based on extensive customer information, is at the heart of successful large-scale service interactions."

Interactions looked at how organisations can maximise their speech investment through best practices and the roll-out of the latest innovations. Included on the agenda was an investigation into how companies like MultiChoice, which receives over 450 000 calls every month, are benefiting from speech technology.

One of the recurring themes throughout the conference was the need for companies to address the emotional and functional aspects of service, to leverage the knowledge that lives in the contact centre, and to think of service as an integral part of the brand.

In his keynote address, Peter Hauser, senior VP and GM, Nuance Communications International, noted that South African businesses were keen adopters of voice technology, with the first local deployments having been completed as far back as 2001.

"There have been 23 joint Nuance-Intelleca deployments in South Africa alone across the banking, telco, insurance, healthcare, media and entertainment, travel, and government sectors," Hauser says. "By the end of 2007, we will have completed more than another 10 call steering and speaker verification deployments."

Speakers including Nuance's Krystyna Hirshman, John West and Jennifer Axelrad, as well as Carlos Goncalves and Shaun Cochrane from Intelleca, went beyond caller experience and application development to look at the foundation of speech solutions, focusing on current and upcoming Nuance and Intelleca technologies and techniques that deliver performance improvements for speech solutions, from the speech engines themselves to the dialogue management and development tools that support them.

Among those covered was a South African English version of Nuance's RealSpeak text-to-speech (TTS) engine which converts input text into spoken output. Developed in partnership with Intelleca, the new female TTS voice, named Tessa (Text-to-Speech South Africa), delivers premium voice quality and natural-sounding synthesised speech for call centre and network-based speech applications.

"Whether users want to enhance call centre service, develop automated voice dialling applications, or automate directory assistance services, RealSpeak delivers a friendly, expressive, highly intelligible speech interface," says Renzon.

He notes that speech is playing an increasingly important role in customer care. "We're seeing large-scale adoption of speech in many of South Africa's leading contact centres to improve customer service; it's natural and customers enjoy using it. The next evolution in speech technology is in the mobile world, where speech will ultimately be the primary input device."