Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and its companion technology, IVR (interactive voice response), are both systems you've almost likely used in a personal or corporate setting.
These are the technologies that enable machines to interact with humans via audio communication by type of send a fax from my iphone, and anyone who has used an automated telephone customer service system, a voice-powered text editing program, or a smartphone interface like Siri on the iPhone has come into contact with some form of ASR/IVR software.
These systems' potential business applications are diverse, and your company could likely benefit from adopting ASR technology in a variety of scenarios.
However, before we go into some suggestions, let's first go through how autonomous voice systems work and "learn" to interact with us.
The Fundamentals of ASR
The following steps comprise the basic mechanism of practically all ASR technology:
You communicate using an ASR interface.
The program contained within the interface generates a raw wave file of what you said.
Background noise reduction and volume modulation are used to tidy up the wave file.
The filtered wave file is divided into phonemes, which are the essential building blocks of works. "ka," "sh," "wh," and "t" are examples of sound blocks. There are 44 in English.
Each phoneme in your wave form is processed in sequence as part of a long chain of sounds, and the ASR software infers full phrases and sentences from this analysis.
The ASR system can then respond to you in a meaningful way.
Some ASR Varieties
We've all dealt with two primary types of ASR systems. "Directed dialogue discussions" and "natural language conversations" are examples of this.
Directed dialogue systems, which include the automated telephone customer care systems used by many businesses, are quite common in the front end, customer service environment. The ASR software in these limited devices simply recognizes words you speak from a limited set of options and reacts verbally to those words.
Natural language interactions, on the other hand, are significantly more complicated and closely resemble real human speech. The more advanced the systems, with a bigger vocabulary, the better their ability to understand and communicate with their human users. Siri on the iPhone is an excellent example of such a system.
How Natural Language ASR Functions
Natural Language ASR systems also learn to reply in conversation in a "similar" manner to human word comprehension. Instead of scanning their whole vocabulary (usually about 60,000 words), they reply to specific "tagged keywords" that provide them with enough context to grasp what you're saying to them.
As an example, if you tell a natural language ASR that you want the "weather forecast," the tagged keyword "forecast" will help it comprehend that your other word is "weather" rather than "whether," which sounds identical but has an entirely different meaning.
To comprehend better, ASR technology can be "trained" in two ways: by human-guided "tuning" or by autonomous automatic learning.
Tuning is a much easier procedure than ASR "training," and it entails human programmers searching through the software's conversation logs for new words and phrases to add to its lexicon for future use.
Automatic learning, on the other hand, entails training the software to catch, recognize, and adopt new words as they are heard and then apply them in the future for greater conversation comprehension.
What ASR Means for the Front End of Your Small Business (customer interaction)
You're probably thinking of ways to apply ASR in your business now that you've obtained a good understanding of how it works.
To begin, there is the most basic cost-saving client-side usage of ASR that your organization may try if it has a lot of straightforward consumer enquiries to handle. Installing an ASR telephone system to field phone calls from businesses with basic enquiries or to utilize as a customer feedback request tool is required.
ASR service providers, like as West Interactive, which generated the thorough infographic that accompanies this story, have varied options for various business budgets and needs.
Back End (workflow management) ASR software can also be utilized in a variety of ways on the back end of a small firm to simplify workloads and task flow. A user can more easily multitask and coordinate undertakings that require going through a large amount of textual material while using voice controlled text editing software.
Furthermore, once familiar with workflow-related ASR technology, dictation of bills, notes, and other company papers is far faster than typing them out.
In summary, consider your firm and where it might profit from ASR systems in terms of cost savings and workflow simplification.
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