14 November 2002

SandCherry: carriers should offer speech resources on a per use basis Dale Hartzell of SandCherry sees two key trends in carriers today regarding speech technology: consolidation of their independent speech services into a single infrastructure to save development, maintenance and management cost: call centre, voice-enabled messaging, voice dialing, voice portal... separation of content and applications ownership from resource ownership. The applications that carriers should own are the ones based on their own content: directory services and voice dialing; but they're no good at traffic directions etc. However, they are well suited to deploy, manage and maintain large pools of resources such as SALT or VXML browsers, recognition engines and TTS engines that they can provide to users as needed. When carriers offer speech resources on a usage basis similar to charging for an 800 call they eliminate the need for each enterprise to buy or build an onsite speech solution. Based on this, we really see three major areas where carriers will focus their service efforts. The first is using voice to augment existing network services: prepaid, voice dialing, voice mail, email and messaging. The second is improving their customer self service and call center. The third area is creating a network-based speech service for enterprise customers. 8:55:46 AM     comments