Contact Centers rely on the best ASR - why are you settling for less?

Currently for IBM, languages are deemed to be of low importance and are not seeing much development. For product teams, this presents a problem. Marketplaces are increasingly international, and vendors need to be able to service more than just native English speakers. They also need to be able to respond confidently to potential customers in new markets and encourage existing customers to add more users or leverage more features to increase consumption. ASR that doesn’t support additional languages or downstream features will inevitably hinder growth.

This is doubly true for CCaaS vendors. If your platform lacks heightened accuracy for speech-to-text, and can’t support international users from a diverse range of demographics, then the rest of your workflows will be severely compromised, in turn hampering usability. This further hinders growth and revenue potential by not being able to penetrate non-English speaking markets.

So, what options do you have?

You could build your own ASR engine with multiple languages. However, this will be time-consuming and costly and may not lead to the desired outcome. You could use a hyperscaler’s ASR. However, if increasing total addressable market (TAM) is a priority for your business, you should be looking at ASR solutions that can service your language requirements at the accuracy levels needed to keep your existing customers happy while helping you to expand into new markets.

As a bonus, we’ve integrated translation capabilities into our single speech API, so your users can translate to and from English in over 30 languages. And, because we’re as focused on an exceptional user experience, our API supports speaker labeling, sentence start and end times, and much more. Translation can help you increase accessibility and reduce language barriers, which presents a key opportunity for contact center operators with an international presence and centralized compliance teams. Speechmatics can help you transform the customer experience by enabling CCaaS providers with real-time transcription and translation to speed up dispute resolutions and call times.

What's in a word?

Speech-to-text accuracy has a huge impact on the quality of downstream tasks. We believe in providing our customers with the tools to quickly and effectively unlock value from audio. Our new release in Summarization has made use of open-source large language models (LLMs) to enable this, providing an efficient means by which to extract, condense, and edit information. The foundation of good summaries and output from utilizing LLMs is the quality and accuracy of your transcript. And the unique combination of world-beating accuracy and experience in both language and machine learning, allows us to deliver the highest-quality stream of outputs so you can be confident to deliver a superior experience. Read more about our accuracy improvements and how this is key when using LLMs to power downstream tasks. 

The contact center is increasingly being modernized with the adoption of AI. By building a strong foundation in ASR, NLU, and NLP, CCaaS providers can:

1) Boost contact center performance by providing valuable insights to agent supervisors to double down on improving their performance.

2) Uncover valuable customer insights related to satisfaction, risks, brand strength, customer churn, and competitor intelligence.

3) Enhance quality monitoring by enabling the efficient review of large samples within a shorter timeframe.

Speechmatics' highly accurate ASR improves the quality of downstream tasks

However, without accurate transcripts, the ability of your NLU and NLP to perform downstream tasks will remain futile. For example, Sentiment Analysis enables valuable strategic insights for users of CCaaS platforms. By analyzing and precisely categorizing speech segments within a transcription as positive, negative, or neutral, contact centers can enable users to monitor customer sentiments and feedback regarding products, specific agents, events, or competitors. Moreover, Sentiment Analysis can be deployed to assess agent behavior and its impact on customer responses - whether certain sentiments elicit desired actions.

Optimize total cost of ownership for your infrastructure when choosing your speech partner by adopting a unified Speech API to transcribe, understand, and unlock value for your customers.

Noisy? Hard to understand? No problem. We enable you to understand every voice, in every condition.

CCaaS providers need to be able to deliver on the ability to perform well against a range of audio conditions while maintaining high accuracy. ASR engines accurately transcribe speech in a variety of conditions such as; noisy contact centers, busy offices, trains, and sports stadiums. ASR that can’t be relied on in a real-world setting, can’t be relied on at all. While most hyperscalers see a reduction in accuracy on audio with background noise, we at Speechmatics use self-supervised learning which enables us to train on much more unlabeled data, so we perform much better on audio containing background noise (check out page 6 to learn more).

Mediocre won't win your market

For busy Product teams, integrating a solution that's part of your existing ecosystem might initially seem like a welcome time saver, but it quickly becomes restrictive. Like all Product teams, hyperscalers are motivated to increase consumption and so limit deployment options.

In a 2023 report, the UK communications regulator OfCom cited concerns that hyperscalers are intentionally limiting competition with “market features that make it more difficult for customers to switch and use multiple suppliers.” Google’s speech-to-text is available on cloud and only offers on-prem as a private feature, while Azure attempts to limit speech-to-text deployment to their own ecosystem, meaning your customers may later be forced to pay for or install features they don’t need in order to access it. Similarly, deployment to locally-hosted containers is often only available for a subset of speech-to-text features. And speech-to-text is treated more as an add-on than a priority offering.

By contrast, specialist ASR providers are built to integrate and fit far more easily into these ecosystems – offering more flexibility alongside better accuracy, additional features, and more personalized support. Speechmatics' Standard model, for example, is highly versatile; our customers don’t need to pay to commission extra training or custom-built models, and we provide flexibility with cloud or on-prem deployments, so you can cater to every security, privacy and data sovereignty requirement your customers might have.

The inconvenient truth

In its 2023 report, OfCom also called out Microsoft and AWS specifically for anti-competitive practices, citing concerns around egress fees, technical restrictions to interoperability, and committed spend discounts. The regulator expressed unease around their potential to leave some customers wholly reliant on and unable to leave one hyperscaler, as well as the negative impact on independent software vendors (ISVs) – with hyperscalers less incentivized to support ISVs with offerings that compete with their own products long term. In the US, Microsoft has also come under fire for anticompetitive practices, albeit from accusations leveled by AWS. 

OfCom’s concerns too shouldn’t be overlooked. Product teams that increasingly rely on hyperscaler solutions may not only find themselves ‘locked in’ to the ecosystems they choose to build on, but may ultimately find their TAMs limited to others within that ecosystem as well.

Partnerships of equals help you focus on innovating

We believe in partnering with our customers to foster continuous innovation in the spaces they operate in. That way, our customers can remain competitive and respond quickly to market needs. Partnering with us gives you access to dedicated go to market, product, and technical support. Our teams prioritize customer feature requests to make sure we are helping CCaaS providers stay competitive and continue to launch new products and features that further differentiate themselves.

ASR that works for you

Hyperscalers serve huge volumes of customers and have little incentive to change their ASR offering to make it more useful for specific customers or use cases.

At Speechmatics, we value offering exceptional experiences to our customers. Our Standard ASR model is highly versatile, so we’re able to work with our customers to understand requirements and pain points, and tailor our solutions to solving them. It’s a level of customization that results in optimized performance, cost savings, and improved efficiency for our customers’ contact center solutions.

To find out how we can help you to take your ASR for CCaaS capabilities to the next level speak to our team today.