In the voice technologies discipline, speech recognition has the potential to completely transform the customer experience. According to Adobe, over 4 in 10 product search journeys originate from voice and speech recognition could also automate a large part of customer support. Interestingly, despite having been around for several decades, speech recognition is an evolving technology – yet to reach full maturity or 100% accuracy. What does this mean for CX?
Let’s find out.
What is Speech Recognition and How Does it Work?
You can define speech recognition as a technology (or a set of technologies) that accept human voice as input, process this raw audio into structured text, and generate some kind of output which could be either a transcription of the text, and analysis, or an automated action). Unlike voice recognition that seeks to match a series of uttered sounds to a pre-defined speaker, speech recognition is dedicated to converting human-generated audio into structured text.
The efficacy of speech recognition depends on how accurately the system can recreate what’s being said. This is harder than it sounds – every human being has their own unique inflexion, tonality, and manner of speaking, almost like a fingerprint. So, it is difficult to translate every speaker’s audio into text with equal accuracy. Also, language is an ever-evolving entity, and machines aren’t always capable of matching audio to meaningful words given the expansive nature of human vocabulary.
Speech recognition tries to overcome this by training its core algorithm on as large and diverse a dataset as possible, feeding it every possible kind of utterance, and its corresponding translation. Advanced AI algorithms are what makes speech recognition more or less accurate today, maturing well beyond its simple, phonetic sound analysis capability from the 1950s.
