The use of speech recognition technology in telephone call centers is about to enter the mainstream

The use of speech recognition technology in telephone call centers is about to enter the mainstream, thanks to falling costs and growing user acceptance of the technology, says a newly published white paper from Datamonitor. Despite a large number of skeptics who say that speech recognition is difficult to implement - as well as costly and unreliable - it is now a viable alterative to interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Rosa Ibragimova, one of the authors of the paper, told Newsbytes that IVR systems tend only to be used by call centers to perform relatively simple tasks over the phone. In many cases, callers listen to the audio menu and then hit zero to talk to a call center agent. "This reduces the cost savings of using IVR instead of an operator," she said. What is worse, some customers may even hang up when they encounter an IVR system on the phone, she said. Speech recognition is also a lot more cost-effective in large call centers, Ibragimova said, since it can handle a wider range of tasks than simple IVR systems, and so reduce the number of calls handled by (human) agents. One classic example where speech recognition has been widely accepted by users is the 4-1-1 directory assistance service in the U.S., which is now almost entirely automated, she added.