UC analytics is an emerging category worth paying attention to because it truly combines all of the information available to a company about their customers, customer interactions, history etc., along with everything going on in the contact center and back office. Why? To improve customer relationships, the contact center and back office. Sure we have talked about this before, but this time we are bringing UC applications and tools into the picture as well.

Want to hear more. Pop over to UCStrategies.com and read the UCViews article that I wrote about it, as well as one that Blair Pleasant wrote on a different aspect of UC analytics. You can find my article here, and Blair’s article here.

Now that I have weighed in on what happened in 2009, what will happen in 2010? Here is what I think will be hot in 2010 in speech -
Hosted Applications
Hosting is going to stay hot. With companies such as Voxeo, Microsoft Tellme, Contact Solutions, Angel.com, and myriad others providing hosting as an adjunct or alternative to premises-based speech deployments, customers have a lot of safe choices for not having to do everything themselves. No longer an anomaly, I believe that we will see hosting brought up in conversation in the majority of deals in 2010, even if it’s only talked about.

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I didn’t personally do a speech technology prediction column at the beginning of 2009, but one of my colleagues at Speech Technology Magazine did. Eric Barkin wrote a feature article, entitled, 2009: What the New Year Will Bring, in which he talks about the effects of the economy on speech technologies, and on some of the predictions for speech from some of my analyst colleagues. It’s debatable whether the economy has gotten that much better in a year, but that didn’t stop the speech industry from moving ahead. Harvesting nuggets from Eric’s column, here are the predictions from that column, followed by what I think did happen in his categories, along with some others that didn’t make it on his list, but made headlines in 2009 nonetheless.

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SpeechTEK 2009 was held this week at the Marriott Marquis in New York, in conjunction with CRM Evolution. As with every conference there tend to be themes that run through the show floor and presentations. SpeechTek 2009 was no different. Among the themes at this year’s show was the concept of speech-on-demand, otherwise known as hosted speech.

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Following on the heels of their April announcement of Nexidia Workbench 6.0, which included improvements to their core speech analytics software, this morning Nexidia announced Enterprise Speech Intelligence 8.0. Together these two announcements contain significant value for the use of speech analytics across all of Nexidia’s core markets (legal, government, rich media), but particularly in the contact center. Let’s look at these two announcements to see the potential impact.

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Kudos to Verint for their latest release focused on speech analytics. This latest release of Impact 360 Speech Analytics makes the deployment and use of SA reachable by the small and mid market, from both a cost and ease of use standpoint. It was only a few years ago that we were just starting to educate companies as to what speech analytics is. Of course we still are, but we have multiple proof points that SA works, and can provide some outstanding value to companies in any vertical. I like to call it “mining for what is missing”, which is to have the system tell the user what they don’t know, because all the traditional analytics that we have on callers, including listening to recorded calls, have limitations. The biggest has been the human limitation of listening to calls as it’s impossible to monitor every recorded or live call, particularly when you are getting hundreds or thousands a day.

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http://www.verint.comI just got back from the second annual Voice Search Conference in San Diego, organized by the non-profit Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS) and Bill Meisel (president, TMA Associates, editor, Speech Strategy News). Last year I blogged on the initial show, and if you read the blog, the show had a lot of contact center content to it, but looking back on now, a lot of it was about applications in their infancy or being done in research, such as using speech recognition alongside contact center agents to collect data, do data dips and populate agent screens during the call to speed up the call, for example.

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So summer is not completely as boring as I wrote in my Dog Days of Summer post this week. There is activity in the speech technologies bullpen.
Late last month, newcomer, Vlingo, announced a new product, Vlingo for Blackberry, which will allow users to create and send e-mails and text-messages, search the Web, work with mobile applications such as dialing their phones, look up contacts or work with their calendars – all using unconstrained speech. This speech applications works on all Blackberry devices, which I was happy about as I have a Blackberry Pearl and applications such as FaceBook, are sorely lacking in functionality on the smaller Pearl keyboard. I’m going to try out Vlingo for Blackberry. Hey, if I’m lucky they will have voice-enabled FaceBook so I can carry my social network addiction on the road. Something like Vlingo would be spot on perfect for the Blackberry Pearl, as it has a small keyboard that has dual letters for each key. FaceBook for Blackberry has a password screen that doesn’t show you the letter that you have typed in the password fields, for security reasons. The problem with this is that with the error correcting mode for typing on the Blackberry, if you can’t see your password, you have no idea what letter Blackberry has put into the password field as it tries to guess at the correct spelling of a word. It’s impossible to log on.

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Some of the most interesting presentations given at last week’s Voice Search conference in San Diego were focused on the contact center. These sessions honed in on four aspects of using speech in the contact center. The first, and most interesting to me, was using voice user interfaces (VUIs) and speech analytics to assist contact center agents to do their jobs more effectively, and also to improve automation of IVR front-ends to contact centers, to enhance the caller experience and agent portion of the call, if required. In this context voice search is really the convergence of speech recognition and analytics to provide contact center agents with information on their screens that they normally would have had to go type to search for.

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There are dozens of conferences and trade shows every year tugging at the attention spans and calendars of customers, prospects, and analysts alike. Next week we have two great competing shows in the VoIP, telephony and unified communications space with VoiceCon in Orlando and VON in San Jose. In that case with topics, products and vendors being equally represented at both, my decision to attend was based on time and geography more than anything. Not so with the new Voice Search Conference that was held in San Diego this week as it was a must attend event for me. We have a lot of shows to choose from, but so few focused on speech technologies as the driver, even if those technologies are now being applied to contact centers, UC, mobility applications and other areas.

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