Who would have thought? These are two leaders in the space. Speech is an interesting business – The market will be huge and become the future of the contact center, used as an interface to speak with computers and more. There is no question the market will get bigger. Still, it doesn’t explain why Nuance agreed to be purchased by Scansoft.
Speech today reminds me of when IP contact center vendors were first touting their products to call centers in the late nineties. We used to feature such companies on the covers of Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine and analysts would regularly write to me and say no one has interest in using VoIP in the call center. Of course these analysts were all wrong and are now doing something else – I haven’t heard from any of them since.
I haven’t had such e-mails about speech but I get the feeling that speech will be huge in the future and is being ignored by too many people. It just makes too much sense. Juts like VoIP, it saves money and like good implementations of VoIP it can increase CRM levels. If you aren’t even considering speech in your contact center you may be doing your company a disservice.
A healthy plug for Speech-World which is collocated with an IP Contact Center Summit is fitting at this point. The show is in
Here is a link to Tracey Schelmetic’s blog that has the details on the merger: Scansoft & Nuance To Merge.
