Speech Trends For Contact Centers And Beyond

Forrester interviewed 250 North American and European contact center decision-makers. About half of the respondents had plans to adopt speech applications on interactive voice response (IVR) or open-standards speech platforms. Enterprises with partially deployed speech solutions also indicated strong interest in converting their touchtone applications to speech during the next few years. The high cost of maintaining older proprietary platforms that do not support key technologies — like VoIP and VoiceXML — provide a catalyst for companies to upgrade legacy IVRs to open-standards speech platforms. Although Forrester's survey included only speech upgrades for IVRs, speech applications provide value to organizations beyond the contact center as companies are also deploying speech applications to automate internal support services. As the cost for speech applications declines and new applications appear, Forrester predicts continued momentum for adoption of speech applications and replacement of legacy IVR equipment throughout the enterprise.