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: India's sunrise call centre industry could face a new threat. It is not a country, say a China or Philippines, but technology that is a cause for concern. Speech recognition technologies that were considered to be of little use when responding to customer queries have finally come of age. These are being deployed by large organisations such as Bank of America, Citigroup, Kodak, Prudential, Verizon, Quest, MCI, T-mobile, American Airlines and Continental Airlines to handle customer queries. The fact that speech recognition is maturing rapidly will ensure that it has to be considered as a threat to Indian call centres. This is spelt out in a report by analyst firm, Datamonitor. It says that over 95 percent of communications take place over the telephone in a call centre. In this scenario, speech automation can be a viable long-term alternative to call centre agents based in offshore locations.

Daniel Hong, Voice Business Analyst at Datamonitor and author of the report says that the cost of servicing a call via speech automation is approximately 15 to 25 percent of the cost involved when it is farmed out to an Indian agent. Compared to IVR systems that bombard users with a never-ending series of menus, speech recognition takes the user's voice input and replies to queries. Current speech recognition engines promise a recognition rate of over 90 percent. That's good enough to answer routine queries. In such cases, you could ring your bank and say 'check balance' and it will prompt you for a unique identification number, authenticate and speak out your balance.

In the past, speech recognition failed to take off because of a machine's inability to make sense of voice input. This was due to the limited voice samples and dictionaries of speech recognition engines. This problem has been overcome with today's speech recognition engines having vocabularies of over 40,000 entries covering most commonly spoken words. Beyond this, vendors are gathering statistics on likely responses to certain questions. This data is used in improving accuracy.