SRC said its sales doubled last year, and that the latest funding round, which brings the company’s total funding to date to $9.6m, will carry it to profitability around the end of 2003.

The speech technology market has experienced something of an upheaval recently, with ScanSoft Inc announcing the acquisition of fellow speech company SpeechWorks International Inc for $132m in April.

However, SRC’s CEO Chris Hart told ComputerWire the creation of that particular speech technology gorilla in the market should not in any way diminish SRC’s prospects, because SRC resells technology from both ScanSoft and SpeechWorks, as well as numerous other providers, including IBM, Microsoft, Nortel Networks, Nuance Communications and Rhetorical Systems.

In the desktop speech-recognition space SRC resells a variety of technology, and also tailors it for vertical markets such as legal, government and medical, by expanding the software’s dictionaries to cope with industry-specific or even company-specific terminology.

The area with higher anticipated growth, however, is SRC’s SRC Telecom division, which sells and services telephony-based speech-recognition offerings. From a major telephony datacenter in Docklands, London, SRC is able to take incoming customer calls from any location, and handle callers using interactive voice response (IVR) technology.

Again the company uses a third party’s IVR system, but it also holds a patent of its own and other intellectual property rights for the way in which the recorded data is transferred to and integrated with a company’s back-end data systems and applications.

For example, one SRC customer enables users to place bets over the telephone, so the IVR system needs to integrate with the betting company’s systems to calculate the latest odds, check the caller’s account status and so on.

Hart said that the crucial thing about IVR is that it is easily personalized to suit the application and vertical market, quick to get up and running, and creates a positive impression for the customer or caller.

Hart believes that the rapid take-up of IVR systems will put a cap on the growth of call centers. I also believe that it will change the nature of call centers, with more repetitive, mundane tasks being handled by IVR and only more complicated requirements then being put through to a live agent, he said. Most call center operator managers will welcome that, because it is in the boring and mundane tasks that it is most difficult to maintain data quality.

SRC was founded in 1995 and claims about 30 customers, including such names as Lloyds TSB, 75,000 of whose employees used an SRC system to register for their share options.

Source: Computerwire