Development in speech recognition has introduced new services that are allowing organizations to be more efficient across different touch points with employees, partners and, more importantly, their customers. Implementing this technology into their operations not only reduces costs, but it also expedites services by accessing the information customers need without long wait times. This is especially evident in large volume contact centers in which companies with millions of customers constantly face challenges in addressing a wide range of issues. One of these companies is Tata Sky, a direct broadcast satellite television provider in India with an active subscriber base of 7.8 million users as of March 2014. The company has deployed the Nuance (News - Alert) speech recognition technology in its contact center to resolve customer requests automatically.

A story on itnewsonline.com reports the implementation of the speech recognition technology has resulted in reducing long call times by eliminating the need for customers to navigate through lengthy menu prompts, which had to be routed to the appropriate agents in the contact center before they were able to receive answers to their query.

Tata integrated the Nuance technology into its Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system so customers can speak directly in Hindi and 10 additional Indian languages (as well as English) to receive answers to their questions or get connected to the right agent.

“We looked to Nuance's speech and language solutions because of Nuance's ability to service our customers as well as the robustness of the solution in terms of handling calls quickly and efficiently. Nuance's professional services helped us to build a solution that integrated well with our current system and mapped well with our business processes” said Harit Nagpal, CEO and Managing Director at Tata Sky.

The automated process lets customers order movies by just speaking the title and the time they would like to view it. As the company adds more services, the speech recognition feature will be used to lower the number of call transfers to live agents, which will reduce the cost of operating call centers.

According to Nuance, this technology lets call centers save money by automating calls; encourage natural, human-like conversations; create more satisfying self-service interactions; build on existing infrastructure, or use one which Nuance provides with an open standard that doesn’t lock the organization into one vendor.

These open standards Nuance supports include, VXML, SSML, SISR, EMMA and SRGS along with active participation in the W3C (News - Alert) in both the Voice Browser and Multimodal Interactions Working Groups. Its development tools generate code in standard Java and XML with no licensed runtime to ensure continued growth of the technology.

“Speech recognition allows customers to have an experience that exceeds expectations. Customers can now receive service how and when they want, by choosing their preferred language and speaking conversationally,” said Nuance’s general manager of India and ASEAN, Sunny Rao.

As one of the leading providers of speech recognition solutions, the technology Nuance Communications (News - Alert) has developed has been used by industry leaders around the world, including nearly two-thirds of Fortune 100 companies, the largest handset and automakers including Apple (News - Alert), Mercedes Benz and many others.