Combined with specially designed digital recording devices, such software in the hands of sales professionals can, on one hand, take advantage of travel time and free the field rep from paperwork in favor of more direct interaction with the customer. Speech-to-text software from companies like Dragon Systems, IBM and Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) make it easy to dictate memos and e-mail for transcription on the computer with remarkable accuracy. These tools offer both power and productivity for a range of sales and service functions from personal productivity tools to hands-free control of mobile applications to call center automation and analysis to voice-enabled electronic commerce. Unlike releases even a year or two old, current products offer speech recognition accuracy as high as 95 percent to 97 percent, while requiring less training and offering greater voice control over the PC. The biggest remaining barriers to leveraging these tools, then, have more to do with cynicism based on previous experience than with the current state of technology. "What has come along with that is the processing power on personal computers, and the memory that goes with it, have both increased to the point where we actually can use more sophisticated modeling technology." "The basic statistical models that drive speech recognition have gotten much more sophisticated," says David Wald, senior technology advisor at Dragon Systems, a long-time developer of speech recognition software. Far from understanding the substance-let along the intent-of your speech, they have been mainly good for the crypto-mystical quality of faulty transcriptions like "He hath delivered to whom of his head confides."īut advances in processing power and memory have put increasingly powerful algorithms within reach of the average PC. Until recently, however, few voice technologies have delivered practical value. "Then, as those capabilities mature, we try to put them into the right type of product." "What we have been doing is steadily building a broad portfolio of voice capabilities," says Nigel Beck, director of marketing for IBM Voice Systems.
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