Here is an update on a startup company in the UK that I’ve been following for a year now, and a few of you may know about. Well worth checking into, VoxIQ provides an enabling technology to the contact center market that combines speech technologies and knowledge databases to assist live agents in providing the best customer service and satisfaction possible - and they do it really fast. The key to VoxIQ’s uniqueness is in the combination of speech recognition and the use of knowledge databases. Many companies use speech recognition or speech analytics to improve agent performance, or knowledge-based systems (KBS) to assist agents, but VoxIQ uses them in tandem, to provide dynamic database information to the agent in real-time as the conversation progresses with the caller.

In case you aren’t familiar with Voxify, they are one of the pioneers in the use of speech-recognition-driven automated agents in contact centers. With customers like Hammacher Schlemmer in retail and Red Lion Hotels in hospitality, Voxify agents have really taken automation in the contact center to a different level. Since coming out with these speech-enabled agents Voxify has made regular updates to the product, so I was thinking that maybe their next move would be to add some sort of speech analytics or knowledge database-driven capability to their agents, but not this round. Instead, they surprised me by announcing two other things at SpeechTEK – allowing customers to deploy their solution on-premise, instead of or in addition to the hosted solution that they have been providing, and enabling contact center managers to change routing and scripting of self-service call flows dynamically.

I spent much of last week in sunny Phoenix at Interactive Intelligence’s partner conference, which was quite a show. For a company of roughly 600 people, competing with the likes of the Cisco’s and Avaya’s of the world, they are doing all right. After 15 consecutive profitable quarters, cash flow is up, sales are way up, and they keep getting awards like Indianapolis’s sixth fastest growing company, placement among Indiana’s 50 great businesses, and just missed cracking the 200 mark among the top 500 Global Software and Services Suppliers – the company ranked 209th in this year’s Software 500, up 21 spots compared to last year.

On the ninth day of UC the industry gave to me interface enhancing,
eight CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

It’s all about the user experience, and what is closer to the user than the application or device user interface. In UC one of the sexier technologies used in user interface design is speech recognition. As one of my primary research focal points I’m a big fan. In fact, I finally caved and bought a Blackberry Pearl this year just for voice-activated dialing (VAD) (I know. I’m a little slow on these things sometimes. It’s like the shoemaker not having any shoes). So, when one of the vendors that I talked to about unified communications wishes, wished for better speech recognition as an interface in mobile devices I jumped on it. Therefore, wish number nine is that ASR and UC vendors continue to overcome reliability issues for ASR used in unified communications applications, make them even simpler, and find even more useful ways to incorporate both ASR and TTS into UC application design.

There are dozens of conferences and trade shows every year tugging at the attention spans and calendars of customers, prospects, and analysts alike. Next week we have two great competing shows in the VoIP, telephony and unified communications space with VoiceCon in Orlando and VON in San Jose. In that case with topics, products and vendors being equally represented at both, my decision to attend was based on time and geography more than anything. Not so with the new Voice Search Conference that was held in San Diego this week as it was a must attend event for me. We have a lot of shows to choose from, but so few focused on speech technologies as the driver, even if those technologies are now being applied to contact centers, UC, mobility applications and other areas.

Some of the most interesting presentations given at last week’s Voice Search conference in San Diego were focused on the contact center. These sessions honed in on four aspects of using speech in the contact center. The first, and most interesting to me, was using voice user interfaces (VUIs) and speech analytics to assist contact center agents to do their jobs more effectively, and also to improve automation of IVR front-ends to contact centers, to enhance the caller experience and agent portion of the call, if required. In this context voice search is really the convergence of speech recognition and analytics to provide contact center agents with information on their screens that they normally would have had to go type to search for.

So summer is not completely as boring as I wrote in my Dog Days of Summer post this week. There is activity in the speech technologies bullpen.

Late last month, newcomer, Vlingo, announced a new product, Vlingo for Blackberry, which will allow users to create and send e-mails and text-messages, search the Web, work with mobile applications such as dialing their phones, look up contacts or work with their calendars - all using unconstrained speech. This speech applications works on all Blackberry devices, which I was happy about as I have a Blackberry Pearl and applications such as FaceBook, are sorely lacking in functionality on the smaller Pearl keyboard. I’m going to try out Vlingo for Blackberry. Hey, if I’m lucky they will have voice-enabled FaceBook so I can carry my social network addiction on the road. Something like Vlingo would be spot on perfect for the Blackberry Pearl, as it has a small keyboard that has dual letters for each key. FaceBook for Blackberry has a password screen that doesn’t show you the letter that you have typed in the password fields, for security reasons. The problem with this is that with the error correcting mode for typing on the Blackberry, if you can’t see your password, you have no idea what letter Blackberry has put into the password field as it tries to guess at the correct spelling of a word. It’s impossible to log on.