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July 13, 1998
Loud and Clear As speech-recognition technology improves, companies are finding that saying is believing By Mary E. Thyfault and Bruce Caldwell 
peech recognition has long promised to simplify person-to-computer interaction-a great concept
with few takers because the technology was unable to handle the nuances of the human voice or
the clutter of noisy work environments. Now, speech-recognition technology is improving, and a
growing number of companies are starting to use it enterprisewide for critical processes.American Airlines next week will become the first U.S. airline to let its customers converse directly with a computer without forcing them to pause unnaturally between words. At the same time, Swiss American Securities has begun rolling out a system that lets its traders execute equities and options orders using speech-recognition technology. That's just the beginning of the trend. Over the next few months, speech recognition will face its most strenuous tests yet as Salomon Smith Barney, the New York Stock Exchange, the New York Mercantile Exchange, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange all put the technology through its paces on their noisy trading floors. While speech-recognition systems are able to filter out background noise in most environments, the technology is unproven on the trading floor, where noise can reach as high as 100 decibels. "Our biggest challenges are noise and accuracy," says Michael Leach, a manager in the equities technology group at Salomon Smith Barney, which is working with UmeVoice to bring speech technology to its clerks on the NYSE trading floor within the next few months. The brokerage says speech recognition could cut the time it takes to input a trade from 15 seconds to just five, providing its sales force with a competitive advantage. "This will dramatically change the way we do business," says David Matthews, manager of NYSE floor operations for Salomon Smith Barney.
Market Boom Today's most powerful enterprise systems can accurately translate continuous speech-not just key words-into digits that a computer recognizes more than 95% of the time. And some of these systems don't need to be trained to understand voices; they can recognize just about anybody's speech. Speech-recognition systems range in price from as little as $200 a port for a limited vocabulary system to $3,000 per port for a system that recognizes tens of thousands of words. The technology will receive another boost in the coming months as vendors roll out software development kits that make it easy for companies to create speech-enabled applications. Still, no one's deploying this technology without heavy testing. But the payback-in terms of hard dollars saved through improved productivity, as well as user satisfaction-is fast, customers say. Both United Parcel Service and Sears, Roebuck & Co., which implemented speech-recognition systems in the last year for package tracking and customer service, say these systems paid for themselves in less than three months. Gartner Group says companies with more than 50 call-center agents using speech recognition will see a payback in nine to 18 months. For American Airlines, the expected payback is improved customer service. Its first speech-recognition application, based on software from Nuance, will help American give its Advantage Platinum frequent fliers better service. After calling the Platinum customer-service desk, customers are asked to say their alphanumeric frequent-flier number. That information will be digitized and matched against American's database, so agents can view the customer's profile as they answer the call. "We don't want our folks to spend their time gathering information they could've gotten more quickly from an automated system," says John Samuel, American's director of interactive marketing. "We love to free them up to deliver better customer service." American's application takes speech recognition to a new level because it recognizes continuous speech. For example, it understands the different ways there are to say a string of numbers. In the fall, American will expand the speech-recognition app to all its customers, letting them speak in full sentences to a computer to get flight and other information.
By year's end, United Airlines plans to deploy a similar system, developed by Applied Language
Technologies, that lets customers request flight information. Last fall, United began letting its
90,000 employees use voice commands to make their own travel reservations using technology
from Applied Language. In March, American Express, the nation's largest travel agency, began
testing Nuance technology that lets corporate customers check flight information and make
airline, hotel, and car reservations.
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