Datamonitor predicts voice business revenues will grow to $5.56 billion in 2006.
A new Datamonitor report investigates the speech recognition market. Advances in the enabling technologies over the last few years have made speech recognition a commercially viable tool that is solving real business problems today. As developers are becoming more expert at understanding the human factors that really determine the success of applications, voice business (the business applications of speech recognition and associated technologies across networks) is really taking off.
Indeed, it is beginning to affect our everyday lives as large companies start to offer voice-enabled services to their customers. Examples include AOL’s AOLbyPhone service, Onstar’s in-car services, Sprint PCS’s voice-activated dialing and numerous carriers’ directory assistance services. Speech recognition allows companies to take advantage of the ubiquity of the telephone, the automation advantages of the Internet and increasing penetration of mobile devices to provide improved service, new revenue and, perhaps most importantly, cost reduction.
North America and Europe currently dominate the voice business market (92% of global revenues) due to higher technology spending, more developed customer service/call center markets and more mature Internet economies in these regions. However, the less developed markets of Asia-Pacific and Central and South America will show significant growth over the period, and will comprise 21% of the total market in 2006.
The voice business will continue to grow, despite a general technological slowdown, since existing implementations have time and time again demonstrated compelling ROIs. These have largely come as a result of increased automation of customer contacts.
Over time, market volume and subsequent economies of scale, standardization allowed by VoiceXML and increased packaging of applications will all combine to help reduce prices and make the ROI even more compelling. By 2006, supply-side market revenues will have grown from $650 million to $5.56 billion. Even in a time when companies are looking at where to cut technology budgets, projects that have an ironclad business case will survive.
