Voice Recognition

Speech Recognition

What is Speech Recognition?

What is speech recognition?

Essentially, speech recognition is the ability of a computer to recognize general, naturally flowing utterances from a wide variety of users. It recognizes the caller's answers to move along the flow of the call.

How does speech recognition differ from dictation software?

Unlike dictation software, speech recognition isn't just trained to one person's voice -- it can recognize anyone's speech, as long as they're speaking in the language the application is designed to understand, and within the possible phrases for that area of the application.

How does speech recognition differ from traditional IVR technology, and what are its advantages?

IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, works off a phone's touch-tone keypad. It's often difficult to navigate and less efficient with complicated menus, and it's almost impossible to use with lists. Speech recognition can handle complex tasks all at once. Callers can easily select from long lists like cities and stocks. In many cases there's only a single menu with speech recognition -- in other words, it's user friendly.

How does speech recognition work?

Speech from the callers comes into the computer, where it's sent to a recognizer and broken into little pieces of sound called phonemes. Each individual sound of the speech can be identified and matched to a predefined list of phrases the caller would say. The recognition is the best match.

Where does it work best ? Will it work on my cell phone, for example?

Speech recognition works in a wide variety of environments. We've developed our speech recognition applications to work with plenty of background noise, including hands-free, in the car -- so yes, it will work with your cell phone.