Voice Recognition Closes In On... Customer Service Call Centers

There’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times entitled ‘Voice Recognition Closes In on HAL‘. It describes the intriguing work that is being done by companies such as IBM to allow you to control some of the systems in your automobile by your voice. It’s a tough environment for voice recognition systems and safety concerns are paramount. However within five years they’re predicting quite phenomenal results, although they may initially appear only on luxury cars.

Such developments help to explain why voice recognition systems are moving so fast into customer service call centers. There’s a huge demand for such systems given that the traditional ways of providing customer service to callers are costly and rarely give customers a satisfactory experience. The technical challenges are very much simpler than trying to make such systems work in an automobile. A customer speaks directly into a telephone and is usually calling from a low-noise background environment. If it takes a few seconds more to identify exactly what is required, then there are no safety concerns. All-in-all it’s highly likely that most of the call centers you call will be using voice recognition response systems long before you’ll have HAL or anyone else controlling your car.