Speech-tech enthusiasts speak up

Companies still searching for the value in speech-related technology can look to several users that detailed their implementations and offered advice Tuesday at the SpeechTek conference in New York.

Honored for their innovation by Speech Technology Magazine, the users ranged from a telco to a railroad, and from an energy company to the New York City Department of Education.

Burlington Northern and Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway installed a speech-recognition system to help monitor train movements along its 25,000 miles of track. Conductors use the radios already present in their locomotives to report when they’re arriving at a station and when they’re leaving, for instance. Instead of talking to a person, these conductors now talk to the voice response system, which in turn sends the collected data to a mainframe so that it is available to others quickly.

At this point, the system is only 70% effective. “We’re not happy with that, but it’s probably pretty good given our noisy environment,” said BNSF’s Shannon McGovern.

She said train whistles and other noise can make it difficult for the system to understand what conductors are trying to tell it. Since BNSF put in the system, it has shortened the conversational aspects to help minimize the chance that background noise could interrupt the call - and it turns out that the conductors like the concise version. Calls that fail are routed to a live person.

The cost of installation was $2.8 million, mostly in hardware and application development, McGovern said. But the savings are projected to reach $4.2 million annually, and the biggest benefit of all is that the railway now has very current, real-time information about train movements.

Installation was completed at the end of July, and the railway has gotten 50% of its conductors to use the new system now.

Verizon was also honored for a speech-recognition system, this one for customers who experience problems with their telephone service in Verizon’s eastern region. Callers are invited to describe their problem and answer other questions, and the system tries to help them diagnose the problem and set up a service appointment if necessary. Verizon put in the system last year, and found that 20% of callers immediately started using it, said Judith Spitz, senior vice president of network systems for Verizon Information Technology.

One benefit is that, during times when more people are calling with phone problems - such as during bad weather - much fewer callers are getting a busy signal. Spitz said there has been no negative effect on customer satisfaction since the switch.

Interestingly, 11% of callers get all the way through a transaction and still opt to speak to a live agent. “This is an opportunity for us to think about whether we really want to offer that option” at the end of the call, Spitz said.

The New York City Department of Education implemented a speech-recognition system for parents of students. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a “huge fan of voice technology” and wanted to make student information available to parents, even those who don’t have access to the Web, said Richard Langford, deputy chief information officer for the Department of Education.