Speech technology is a funny thing...its potential is great, it certainly hasn't suffered from a lack of hype, but many companies are STILL dragging their feet when it comes to even experimenting with speech. According to Benchmark Portal, these companies may have reached the end of their dithering and are ready to make a commitment: According to their research, fifty percent of companies currently not using speech are considering implementing it within the next year. We're looking forward to see the market heating up.

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Preliminary Results Indicate that Fifty Percent of Call Centers Not Currently Speech-Enabled Plan� on Implementing Speech within the Next Year

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 11, 2005 -- Edify® Corporation, a leading global supplier of voice and speech solutions, today announced it has joined forces with Purdue University’s Center for Customer-Driven Quality to determine best practices for deploying speech recognition systems.

It's that time of year: time to� crunch the numbers to prepare for the Global Call Center Outsourcing Summit on May 25th in Dallas at the Westin Park Central Hotel,� the event during which TMC and Customer Interaction Solutions magazine hold a dinner event to honor the Top 50 Teleservices Agencies companies and the recipients of the MVP (Marketing Via Phone) Quality Award.

I'm an editor, but I usually look forward to this time of year: it's nice to work with numbers sometimes. Numbers are absolute: they have no versions, innuendo or verb declensions.

Since we're the only company that conducts a ranking of this nature (companies are ranked by their size, as determined by number of billable minutes for a one-year period), we're the only organization that has a complete� view of� both the status quo and the growth of this� industry.

The speech technology industry is changing shape, though I'm sure that's not news to most people in the contact center industry. With yesterday's announcement of the merger of Nuance and ScanSoft, and the below announcement of cooperation between LumenVox and Nuance 8.5, we can presume that we haven't seen the last of the shifting of both the speech behemoths and the smaller speech application innovators.

Industry insight tells us that the market as a whole has been slow to adopt speech. We can presume that a lot of companies have� been scared off by what they perceive to be the tech-intense process of creating dialogs and scripts...companies foresee themselves as having to hire nine engineers just to maintain their speech applications.

According to a report announced this morning by Datamonitor, "Global sourcing in European and North American Financial Services,"� financial services companies are in part driving the boom growth numbers in offshore outsourcing. Both North American and European financial services providers (particularly U.K. and Scandinavian companies) are increasingly sending core competency processes (mortgage processing, insurance underwriting, claims processing)� offshore. Part of the reason, according to the report, is the increasing flexibility to do so that today's enterprise technologies provide for.