Integrating new technology into your business can feel like standing on one edge of a chasm. Across the divide, benefits await – whether that’s better customer understanding, greater efficiency, boosted productivity or easier compliance.
But actually getting to that promised land can seem time-consuming, complicated, and risky. By breaking the process down into five clear steps, you can feel much more comfortable about investing in speech-to-text, make integration effortless, and ensure you get the return on investment your organization is seeking.
Step One: Build the Case for Speech-to-Text
The first, critical step is to be clear on exactly what your needs are, and what you’re expecting to see as a result. Speech-to-text isn’t a one-size fits all technology; educators requiring lecture transcripts will have very different needs and success metrics to global financial services using automatic speech recognition for compliance.
Take the time to figure out exactly ‘what good looks like’ for your organization, and what nuances you might need to consider. Ideally, your technology provider should also act as a consultant, considering factors like your data security obligations.
Speechmatics’ approach is to work with you up-front to understand your needs and give you a realistic outline of what you can expect to achieve, rather than generic promises. Time spent now makes life simpler later, so at this point, it’s worth investing the hours.
Step Two: Trial the Technology
Investing time and money into new technology always comes with an element of risk. But the more you know about what you’re working with, the lower that risk becomes. While a product demo is useful, you should ideally put the technology to the test in your own environment.
Speechmatics offers every potential customer a business trial, giving you access to all the same features and language functionality as our full product. This creates a meaningful opportunity to test and explore what value you could unlock – putting your mind at rest in terms of ROI.
All you need to get started is a working knowledge of APIs, a file to transcribe, and a command-line utility to make API calls. Then, we’ll share an API key and all the documentation you need to integrate our technology into your workflow as smoothly as possible.
Step Three: Seek Smooth Integration
Once you’re satisfied the technology will deliver the value you’re after, take the time to establish how difficult integrating the technology into your workflow or service will actually be.
In practice, this means having discussions with your potential vendor that go beyond accuracy and speed comparisons (although these are certainly important). Be sure to find out exactly how easy it will be to start using the technology – and find out what support your provider will offer you.
At Speechmatics, we believe passionately that practical barriers should never get in the way of embracing innovation, so our team has worked hard to make implementing our speech-to-text technology as simple as possible. Our flexible technology has open and accessible architecture – along with robustly tested APIs and high-quality digital tooling – that means businesses of all shapes and sizes can smoothly integrate it into their products and solutions. This minimizes your time to market and shortens your path to value significantly.
Step Four: Build the Right Relationships
Having access to the cutting-edge of machine learning research means nothing if your provider doesn’t have the right team in place to help you on the path to value. So, along with the technical performance features and ease of integration, make sure you choose a speech-to-text technology partner that can adequately support your journey.
For the Speechmatics team, adding value to your use case with the right support is a key driver – and our commitment to collaboration means we’ll always work with you to build the best outcomes, whether that’s through our support portal or directly with a member of the product team.
Step Five: Prepare to Evolve
The world of speech-to-text is moving fast, which means unlocking value from this technology isn’t a ‘one and done’ process. With every innovation that occurs – from fractional gains in accuracy to seismic evolutions in machine learning – you need to ensure you can reap the maximum financial reward.
For the Speechmatics team, innovation is our driving force – and we never stop looking for ways to deliver the best outcomes for our clients. But we’re also aware of the need to support our customers in actually benefiting from those advances.
So, whether you’ve deployed our technology on-premises or in the cloud, we maintain regular product release schedules that ensure customers always have access to our latest and greatest features and languages. Meanwhile, our team is always on hand to help you understand and unlock value from any update we make.
Make ROI a Reality
To recap how to maximize ROI with speech-to-text:
Build the case for speech-to-text
Trial the technology
Seek smooth integration
Build the right relationships
Prepare to evolve
With every month that passes, ongoing research and new developments make speech-to-text a bigger source of potential value than ever before. And while getting started can feel intimidating, it’s never been easier to realize the benefits of this technology – particularly when you have the right partner in place to support your journey.
To learn more about the potential for the ROI of speech-to-text for your organization – and what your path to value could look like – speak to our sales team today.