“You Speak My Language”: The Need for Industry-specific ASR

The automated speech recognition (ASR) market is booming and is expected to be worth $31.82 billion by 2025. While much of ASR development is being used to power consumer products and virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, the boom in speech recognition will have a dramatic impact on contact centers as well. As ASR technology becomes more sophisticated, it will play a larger role in specialized markets such as finance, medicine, and travel, where industry-specific terms and language could present a problem.

As ASR technology becomes more sophisticated, it will play a larger role in specialized markets such as finance, medicine, and travel, where industry-specific terms and language could present a problem.

Using ASR as part of IVR open-end surveys provides call centers with powerful new tools to assess and improve customer experience (CX). Customer responses can be captured, automatically transcribed, and used for follow-up, call center training, and analytics. However, there are a variety of factors that can affect the accuracy of ASR transcripts, such as voice quality, accents, background noise, and industry-specific terminology. With voice analytics becoming more important for call center interactions, transcription accuracy is critical.

Applying Industry-specific IVRs

ASR technology has to be tuned to meet the unique needs of different markets. Machine learning and artificial intelligence help refine ASR software to improve accuracy, but if you start with an industry-specific solution then you are ahead of the game.

Pinpoint Research has introduced three industry-specific IVR solutions that include ASR transcription:

• Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare – Our Healthcare ASR model has been tuned to recognized drug names and medical terminology and has already been used by health insurance and pharmaceutical companies. The model offers rich training data covering issues such as pre-authorization for procedures, insurance claim disputes, disease-specific queries, and other medical terms and conditions. Although specifically tuned for healthcare and pharmaceutical applications, it can easily be extended for hospitals, care facilities, and other healthcare applications.
• Banking and Financial Services – The financial services market has its own lexicon, so we developed our Financial ASR model with lenders in mind. We developed the model using call center data from financial institutions to cover loan-related interactions, but it can be readily expanded to cover additional services with additional audio training data.
• Airlines and Travel – Accurately capturing interactions about travel can be especially tricky because of destinations and airport names. That’s why we developed an Airline model with airline operators in mind. Our Airline model is loaded with common industry terminology, including city and airport names, and is ideal for generating transcripts for call center training and data for analytics.

Accurately capturing industry-specific terminology as part of IVR surveys provides a rich repository of data for assessing CX, analytics, call center training, and other applications. You need the right ASR model if you want rich voice data that has real value. If you don’t have the best quality transcripts to begin with, you can’t expect meaningful results.