Voice assistants are evolving into the new modern man’s best friend! A voice assistance integrated device can assist you in many ways, from making routine calls to waking you up in the morning. 

Today, people worldwide use digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistants frequently. We’ll discuss the development and integration of Alexa skills to help you understand the hype and how it can help you, in the eCommerce sector, get your product to interact with the target market. 

Alexa skills are tools and features businesses use to make it easier for customers to use the Alexa voice assistant to access their apps, goods, and services. You should definitely consider how this could help the success of your eCommerce business. 

Imagine the potential for conversion rate improvement if users could simply say the name of a product to order from a shopping app rather than spending hours browsing. It would undoubtedly make interaction easy and aid businesses in reducing turnover. 

Stay tuned if achieving this fits with your plans for business growth! We will explain the development process, advantages, and uses of Alexa Skills to help you understand how it can assist your eCommerce business in achieving this. 

An introduction to Alexa skill Development 

Amazon manages and creates the voice assistant service known as Alexa. Alexa is built into every echo device, making it simple and quick to navigate shopping, play music, and find product information. 

The Alexa voice assistant makes use of Alexa skills for this. It enables Alexa to understand user commands and carry them out appropriately. 

The Process Behind the Amazon Alexa skill Development

Although it is strange to discover that your speaker comprehends you better than your neighbors, rest assured that it is not some peculiar occult! Alexa Skills development is based on a solid architecture that makes it interact with users and comprehend voice commands. 

Let’s use the straightforward example of asking an Alexa-integrated device to wake you up to understand this better: 

Consider setting the alarm for seven in the morning. You start by telling Alexa to wake you up at seven in the morning. This will trigger an Alexa Skill (think of it as an app) to set the alarm. Once the appropriate skill is activated, it will call a lambda function to set the alarm and wake you up at 7 in the morning. 

Benefits of Alexa Skill Development

You would have to invest a lot of time and money to start the Alexa Skill development process. Therefore, you must ensure that the benefits of Alexa skills align with your current business needs to ensure that this investment pays off favorably for your business.  

Additionally, by being aware of the advantages of Amazon Alexa skill development, you can monitor how beneficial the process is for your company.  

The following is a list of benefits the Alexa Skills development process has for your eCommerce business: 

Improved Interaction: Your app’s functionalities will be more accessible for users to access with the help of Alexa Skills development. In the long run, it would imply that your users wouldn’t need to access the app directly to use its functionalities. Using voice commands can easily enhance that, significantly improving the user’s experience. 

Competitive Edge: Developing an Amazon Alexa skill will let your app be ahead of the lot. Since your business will be able to use a unique process that improves accessibility and makes navigation more engaging. This will aid in giving your brand a distinct identity that will help it make more potential users. 

Increased functional scope: The Alexa Skill Kit frequently receives new updates and features. Consequently, with the help of the Alexa Skill development process, your business application will have a broader scope for growth and functionality enhancement. This would help your business stay current and meet changing user demands in the long term. 

Market Acceptance: Investors have recently started praising Alexa Skills as their development is slowly picking up. Early adoption of Alexa Skills will help your company establish a reputation for being forward-thinking and creative. In the long run, this can assist you in ensuring favorable media coverage of your services. 

Huge Market: The majority of devices use Alexa as a voice assistant. You can easily access Alexa’s sizable user base and market by developing your skills with the development. Ultimately, it denotes improved outreach and a higher likelihood of conversions. 

How to Use Alexa Skills for my eCommerce Brand. Can I make Skills for My Business App on Alexa? 

Glad you inquired! Yes, you can make Alexa skills to enhance its navigation and complement your digital solutions. You can use the Alexa Skills Kit that Amazon offers or hire a software development company with expertise in developing Amazon Alexa Skills and discuss your ideas with them. Though costs and turnaround times for developing Alexa skills vary from agency to agency, the size and complexity of your project have the most extensive impact. 

In your personal life, using Alexa skills and smart technology is undoubtedly enjoyable and helpful. But you might not be aware that Alexa can help your online eCommerce business in other ways, apart from the benefits we discussed earlier. 

Here are some ways to use Alexa skills to boost your business’s internal processes and the customer experience. 

Product Suggestions 

An Alexa skill can look for a specific type or style of product and recommend it via email newsletters with a buy link that directs the email recipient to the retailer’s website. They can purchase it and look for additional options such as size, color, etc. For instance, you might ask Alexa to “find me a red to wear to a birthday party.” 

Offers and Coupons 

Through voice commands, Alexa can inform customers of the current store specials and offer information for coupons. For instance, “Alexa, find me a coupon” or “Alexa, find me the deal of the day.” 

Product Acquisition 

Want to provide your customers with a better experience as a customer-owner? With Alexa, your customers can buy products by speaking their voice through the Alexa device’s catalog. A user can use Alexa to order a product after making their choice. ‘Alexa, order some coffee.’ 

Reorder 

Customers can easily place a voice order for their preferred product on Alexa. Additionally, this will increase the order of orders and customer lifetime value. Alexa, reorder my moisturizer. 

Quick Checkout 

Alexa will use the Amazon pay 1-click setting to give customers a quick checkout experience when a customer tries to place a new order or choose any item to purchase. After selecting a product, users only need to say, “Alexa, buy this.” 

Cart management 

This feature allows customers to use voice commands to manage their cart on Alexa devices. Customers can get the cart, add or remove items, clear the cart of all items, and place items for all of the items in the cart. For instance, you could ask Alexa, “what’s in my cart” or “Alexa, clear my cart.” 

Manage Subscriptions 

Customers can manage their product subscriptions for products they frequently order. They can alter the frequency, skip a delivery, or determine when the subsequent delivery will occur. Alexa, when is my next delivery, for instance, or “Alexa, skip my next delivery.” 

FAQ 

This feature enables an online retailer to answer common questions from customers. The user will receive a variety of FAQ responses from this, and customers will be able to know more about you and your products. For instance, “Alexa, explain how your product works.” 

Store Locator, Business Hours, and Future Events 

Your customers can look up the nearest store, the hours of operation, and upcoming events in a specific store using this feature. Customers can set their default store as the one closest to them and obtain information about other stores by mentioning the location name, such as store hours and upcoming events. For instance, “Alexa, find a store near me” or “Alexa, what are the central mall store hours.” 

Rules and services 

This will include details about your return policy, order cancellation policy, and customer service information. It’s for providing the customer with information about your procedures and contact details that will be helpful to them. For instance, you could ask Alexa, “Alexa, what is your return policy,” or “Alexa, what is your shipping policy.” 

Flash Briefings 

A feature that customers can use to get information every day. It offers all kinds of information, including news, advice, facts, and some daily releases. Customers must activate this Alexa feature to receive daily flash briefings. Simply asking Alexa, “What are the flash briefings” or “Alexa, read my flash briefings” will do. 

Order Status 

With the help of this feature, a customer can ask Alexa for the most recent order status. The customer only needs to ask Alexa, “What’s my order status,” to learn the order status. 

Notifications 

This is a very intriguing Alexa feature. By utilizing this feature, we can inform customers about their orders and the products they are looking for but cannot buy at the moment. The user will get a real-time notification on their Alexa devices. They must make notifications for the particular order and products available for this. 

The process for developing Alexa skills 

Understanding what takes place during the development of an Alexa skill is essential for planning and successfully implementing its functionality. Because it will enable you to help a comprehensive understanding of the entire process. To help you gain a better understanding, the following is a step-by-step blueprint of the Amazon Alexa skill development process. 

Skills Development for Alexa 

The development team will examine your digital solution to find the scope for Alexa skill integration before beginning the development of Alexa skills. 

After the discussion has cleared up the areas where Alexa skills can be helpful, the development process will begin. 

The development team will utilize Alexa Skill Kit during the development process. A toolkit designed to help develop Alexa Skills is what the Alexa Skill Kit essentially is. It has tools and APIs that make the development process easier. 

The team will test the effectiveness of the Alexa Skill after the development process is complete and will also solicit your feedback. The developers will then move on to the deployment phase once they are satisfied with the finished products. 

The Alexa skills will then be installed on your live app and made accessible to everyone. Our agency also offers maintenance support for a limited time to help you become accustomed to using Alexa Skills. 

Conclusion

Using Alexa skills with the Amazon Echo to play music or check the weather is excellent. But there’s a lot more you can do. Ecommerce businesses can use Amazon Alexa skills development for business to improve efficiency and even boost sales. The time has come to help how using Alexa skills can benefit you. 

The post Alexa Skill Development: Benefits and Applications For eCommerce appeared first on Beyond Key.

As for companies, you know that happy customers are your foundation and the key to your continued success if you listen to their concerns, needs, and ideas. Customer feedback gives you the ability to better understand your customers so that you can provide an exceptional customer experience, every time. Speech analytics software initially became available in about 2002. Since then its popularity has grown exponentially. Today, the level of accuracy of these systems as well as the speed to customer intelligence they offer have made speech analytics a must-have versus a nice-to-have for companies that want to improve efficiency, agent performance, compliance adherence, revenue, and the customer experience.

Benefits of Using Speech Analytics Software

Speech analytics is a powerful tool that helps to unlock insights as it allows managers to understand the behavior of top performers. You can improve your business process with a robust, scalable, and flexible speech recognition solution to analyze customer sentiments. Speech analytics software helps mine and analyze audio data, detecting things like emotion, tone, and stress in a customer’s voice, the reason for the call, satisfaction, the products mentioned, and more.

Lower Expenses by Automation
Reduce your manpower cost by automating the conversation analysis process which offers instant insights into phone conversations, or audio/video files.

Improve Strategic Business Decisions
Improve strategic decisions basis sentiment and conversation insights to understand your customers better to refine your future serviceability and product offerings. With Speech Analytics, contact centers can get insights quickly. Since it monitors and reports on all conversations, it automatically takes the raw data, organizes, and analyses it, and generates insights based on what companies want to track, which will help to make strategies for improving the business process, which will lead to the revenue generation process.

Save Time in Extracting Analytical reports
With new technologies, such as speech analytics, contact centers can create better customer experiences, where they can easily save time by extracting the analytical reports holistically. The insights received from analytics also help improve the performance of agents and find out their shortcomings. If utilized correctly, the analytics can help in improving the effectiveness of campaigns and improving conversation rates.

Manage Operations Efficiency
Basis the conversation analytics reports analyze your team’s performance in handling the conversations and design future training courses for your staff. The outcome will be smooth client handling benefits while offering improved CX.

Accuracy
Make more sense of your transcription with domain-specific targeted words/phrases. For accuracy, the analysis helps to uncover an issue, which can help the agents to get the information and as a result, it will help to decrease the number of call-backs by establishing the proper expectations with customers, this will lead to accurate outputs.

Increases cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
Leveraging the contact center to drive revenue through cross-selling and up-selling pitches in interactions is a smart strategy. The information can then be used to enhance sales conversion rates which help to produce more effective marketing campaigns.

Features of Speech Analytics Platform

Speech Adaptation
Customize your speech analytics application by inserting industry-specific or unique terms/phrases for auto-detection of words.

Multi-channel
Recognize and transcribe multiple participants in a conversation. Transcribe and analyze millions of calls to discover customer insights and improve contact center performance.

Content Filtering
Redact your transcription of specific content like inappropriate words, confidential and personal information. When you have access to this vital information, you can take proactive measures to make changes and improvements.

KPIs That Can Be Improved Using Speech Analytics Data

There are several KPIs you can track with speech analytics software. First call resolution rate, service response times, customer satisfaction, Script Compliance or Improvement, Reduced Repeat calls, and wait time are some examples. Once you pick your KPIs, benchmark your current performance levels.

One good exercise to see if you can derive meaning from your KPIs is to have a look at the compiled list of the most important call center metrics:

Quality Scores: Providing an overall score for the caller experience. Call Center Quality scores can be monitored at the agent and group levels. When you track 100% of customer interactions, supervisors and agents can get an accurate and unbiased view of how well they are doing.

Reduced Repeat Calls: For the improvement in efficiency and reduction in repeat calls, speech analytics is a powerful software. Reducing repeat calls not only reduces overall call volume but at the same time leads to greater customer satisfaction, which can help to revenue enhancement.

First Call Resolution (FCR): Measures the percentage of conversations that get resolved on the first contact. Simply divide the number of calls that are resolved on the first contact by the total number of first contacts. You can get even more sophisticated by segmenting data by call reason, call type, etc.

Customer Satisfaction: Looks at the agent behaviors and processes that most affect the customer experience. Beyond looking for words and phrases that indicate dissatisfaction, speech analytics also looks at sentiment by monitoring, silence, and loudness in the voice.

Script Compliance or Improvement: Script compliance is often a top priority, contact centers often employ scripts to ensure a consistent approach to customer interactions and to deliver an excellent customer experience. Especially in highly reputed industries, call center agents must be very careful and adhere to the approved script when dealing with sensitive information. With the help of the software, managers can easily mine calls to ensure that agents are properly following the script and performing at a high level.

Average Handling Time (AHT): The total amount of time it takes to handle a call, measuring different areas such as talk time, on-hold time, and wrap-up time. To get an accurate assessment of agent performance it is important to average handle times over several calls.

Use Case of Speech Analytics Platform

Keyword Spotting
Focus and identify specific keywords and phrases to filter only the relevant conversations that drive domains specific insights and performance. Speech analytics software identifies words and phrases, based on a library defined by the user. This type of call analytics can be used to detect trends in customer interactions and analyses audio patterns to detect emotions and stress in a speaker’s voice.

Theme Discovery
Identify the intent and purpose of a conversation to take proactive actions and make them better.

Transcription
Create transcripts from a variety of calls like customer service calls, sales calls, meeting recordings, etc. The audio undergoes the transcription process that turns the sounds into text. At the same time, acoustic signals such as agitation in the voice, tempo, loudness, and silence are extracted.

Customer Segment Identification
Create and identify new customer segments based on their conversations to enhance personalized experiences.

Final Thoughts!

Creating a positive customer experience is the key to building a successful business. Knowing what customers want before they change their minds, or move on to your competitors, will help create a positive customer experience. Since you can’t read their minds, the next best thing is using speech analytics to capture 100% of your customer conversations.

Speech analytics saves businesses time and delivers value through loyal customers, increased revenue, and decreased expenses. But, launching new speech analytics software doesn’t perform miracles overnight. It takes time. Begin with a plan before pitching it to management, know your facts, pick the right solution, and show the value to your employees. When you do, you’ll reap the benefits. Use these best practices as a guide to get it right from the start and avoid any surprises

Connect with us today to get a personalized demo of our custom NLP-powered Speech Intelligence platform called Tawq. 

Further Insights

Speech To Text Technology

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While chatbots are a relatively new technology, they are gaining immense popularity in the digital world and among consumers as of late. With virtual assistants in more and more homes every day and with a wealth of information just a few taps away on our smartphones, we’ve grown accustomed to having instantaneous access to all the answers we’re looking for. That’s why it’s crucial for businesses to adapt. Chatbot can provide that instantaneous response users are looking for and still provide a memorable customer experience.

Even if you’re already aware of the growing presence and importance to know that your business would benefit from one, you may still be wondering how exactly it would fit into your marketing or support strategy or how to build one. Luckily, we’ve created this simple guide on creating a great customer experience using a chatbot in seven steps.

1. Identify Your Chatbot Goals

Having an ultimately successful chatbot depends on having a real issue it can solve. Don’t develop a chatbot simply because you see other sites doing it or read about them in a marketing blog. You should have realistic goals you want to meet with your chatbot.

So, what are these goals? When determining your chatbot goals, you should be thinking about the customer. Why would your customer engage with a bot? What would they be looking for? How do you anticipate they will interact with your chatbot and what steps do you want them to take afterward?

Your chatbot goals should largely reflect company goals that are short-term. What types of tasks would be best suited for a chatbot? Perhaps you want your chatbot to answer FAQs for your customers. Or maybe you want your chatbot to be proactive and focus on informing users of new services or products you offer. Whatever items you decide on, the ultimate mission is to create an easier, quicker, and more satisfying experience for your customers.

Once you’ve clearly identified the goals you want your chatbot to achieve, it’s time to start the design process.

2. Choose Custom-Made or Ready-to-Use?

There are two avenues you can take when deciding to create a chatbot. You can choose a ready-to-use bot-building platform or you can choose to custom-make your chatbot from scratch. Both have pros and cons that you should be aware of before making a decision.

Custom Chatbot: Pros and Cons

A custom bot is a great choice if you are looking for specific features and want plenty of flexibility to make adjustments along the way. Custom bots also give you the opportunity to create an in-depth conversation flow.

It’s also important to consider the cons of choosing a custom chatbot. If you don’t have the technical know-how, you’ll probably have to hire a developer to build your bot. Depending on the features you want and how complicated your bot is, the process may take more time and money to complete than you want to spend.

Ready-to-Use Chatbot: Pros and Cons

An out-of-the-box chatbot saves you from having to hire a developer or have the substantial technical know-how. There’s no coding required, the process is much faster, and the cost is much lower. If you don’t have a ton of resources at your disposal or you’re in a time crunch, a ready-to-use bot is a way to go.

On the other hand, a ready-to-use chatbot has its limitations. It’s already been built, so the types of features you can add or changes you can make will probably be severely limited. Depending on the bot building platform, you may find restrictions on which channels you can use your bot on.

3. Designing Your Chatbot

Now it’s time to decide on your chatbot design. There are several things you’ll need to consider. Do you want a text-based chatbot or a voice-based chatbot? A text-based messenger chatbot, works on one or more messaging platforms. Users will likely interact with this kind of chatbot on a screen, like their mobile device or computer. A voice-based chatbot works differently. Users interact with a voice-based chatbot by speaking to it in their natural language, usually screen-free.

Once you’ve decided which kind of chatbot you need, it’s time to design your conversation flow. There should be a balance of functionality and engagement. Here are a few things to consider:

Keep the conversation flow naturally.

Think about your customers and about the different things they might talk about with your bot. Think about how those conversations could start. For example, people usually begin a conversation with a greeting such as “hello” or “hi there”. Your bot will need to be able to recognize these phrases and respond with a “greeting message”. Also, keep in mind that your bot will more than likely receive unexpected responses, so ensure that they are accounted for when designing your conversation.

Offer quick reply options.

‘Yes’ or ‘No’ buttons or suggested topic or question buttons can create an easy and timely experience for your users. Quick reply options are also great for users that aren’t quite sure what they need or what topic their question falls into.

Don’t be afraid to give hints.

A great way to make sure your conversations stay focused is to give responses that are suggestive and not too open-ended. For example: “What type of vehicle are you interested in? Right now, we have sedans and full-size SUVs on sale.”

Make your answers vary.

One key to a successful chatbot is making sure it doesn’t sound like a, well, bot. Give your chatbot a variety of answers and change up how it begins and ends its sentences.

Make your chatbot likable.

Don’t be afraid to give your bot some personality. You don’t want to make it rude or over the top, but also don’t be afraid to throw in a few jokes here and there to keep the conversation light and the user engaged.

4. Be Available if Necessary

Chatbots are, well, bots. There are certain limitations to what they can do. Offering users the option to speak with a human if they want can be the difference between keeping them on your site and obtaining a lead and having them bounce. Not only should this be a frequently available option to users, it should also be obvious.

5. Choose the Appropriate Channels

Your chatbot doesn’t have to live exclusively on your website. In fact, chatbots can be used across multiple channels and can connect conversations. Think about where your target audience spends the most time. With a multitude of platforms available today, you can utilize their interfaces to link your bot to multiple channels, thereby reaching more of those target users.

Whichever platforms you decide on, make sure you give your chatbot a presence. Don’t let it simply hide in a corner. Get creative and look for opportunities to use your chatbot to convert.

6. Don’t Hesitate to Test Your Ideas

Even with the best designs, it’s incredibly important to test things out. This is especially important before making your chatbot live. Make sure it accurately answers questions, helps customers find solutions, is easy to use, and that there are no kinks to work out.

What you should be checking for:

1. Onboarding process

This is the first item you’ll want to check when testing your bot. Verifying the onboarding process means ensuring that your chatbot initiates engagement with a user a soon as they open the bot window.

2. Accurate, working links

Make that any link your bot provides a user works and goes to where it’s supposed to. Broken links or links that lead nowhere will hurt your user experience.

3. When your chatbot is confused

As previously mentioned, your bot will likely encounter some unusual or challenging responses from users. Make sure there’s an input in place for when your chatbot doesn’t understand a user’s response or what they want. It can be something as simple as, “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean. Can you try rephrasing your question?”

7. Continue to Learn

The best companies are constantly evolving. Even once you’ve designed, tested, and resolved initial issues with your chatbot, that doesn’t mean the job is done. It’s critically important to continue to collect and analyze data regularly to determine what’s working and what’s not and to improve where you can. This will ensure that your customer experience is always in-touch with what users are looking for and meets their expectations.

Check out our voice chatbot page to see what we have to offer. Not sure what features are right for your business? Our experts can help! Reach out to the Beyond Voice team using our contact form to learn more.

The post Creating a Great Customer Experience Using a Chatbot in 7 Steps appeared first on Beyond Key.

Within the last several years, speech recognition has come a long way. It’s a powerful tool that can help businesses in a variety of industries increase levels of productivity and success. So how can your company benefit from harnessing speech recognition? Learn about seven innovative ways to use speech recognition in business below!

1. Get in Touch with Your Customers

At the end of the day, there’s nothing more important than what your customers think. How they perceive your brand is critical to your success or failure. That’s why it’s so important to gain a deep understanding of how they feel about your products, services, and business overall. Our speech recognition technology gives you the ability to better interpret your customers’ feelings by performing in-depth data mining on recorded calls, which ultimately provides a clearer overall picture of your business’ health.

2. Learn More About Your Customers

You can perform in-depth data mining on your audio and video files with our speech recognition technology to identify key demographic information about your customers, including gender, estimated age, language spoken, accent, emotion and sentiment, speech patterns, action items, and more. With such valuable information, you can craft marketing campaigns that are highly-targeted, increase sales and support performance, and more.

3. Monitor Your Support Team

When your clients contact your support team, you can assume it’s something important. As support team members field these calls, they must convey accurate information in a way that’s approachable, understandable, and on-brand. By utilizing the power of speech recognition to capture and analyze audio, tracking each client-support team member interaction becomes easy and can be used to better understand and monitor your representatives.

4. Identify Callers and Mitigate Risk

Our speech recognition solutions give you the ability to analyze audio using industry-leading voice biometrics, allowing your business to easily identify and authenticate each caller to better detect and mitigate fraud. This is especially important for industries such as Finance and Government.

5. Streamline Your Support Process

Recorded audio from your support calls holds the key to providing optimal support to your customers. After capturing customer interactions and analyzing the findings, you can precisely identify issues that people request help for the most and work to make the support process as optimized as possible.

6. Utilize Automatic Transcription to Save Time

If you have a business with a small staff and limited resources, productivity and efficiency are critical priorities. With the power of speech recognition, you can covert your audio and video files into accurate text and help automate processes like complaint analysis, call and caller categorization, demographic analysis, legal compliance, NPS analysis, and more.

7. Use Voice Data to Continuously Optimize

With such valuable data available, it’s important to analyze and optimize. Accurate voice data from customer interactions and support calls give you the opportunity to continuously grow and improve all your related workflows and business processes.

Ready to start using the power of speech recognition to advance your business? Reach out to our team of voice technology experts to learn more or to get started on your project by contacting us. In the meantime, check out our top-rated voice transcription services.

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Consumer behavior is day by day being dominated by the way people are getting accustomed to using voice technology and voice assistants. Voice and AI have completely changed the way we interact with technology and our devices. Things are becoming truly digital, no matter where you are or what you are doing.

Voice assistants are no longer a passing trend. They are becoming a fixture of modern living. This is quite evident with recent Juniper research, which estimates about 8 billion voice assistants will be in use in 2023, and their growth rate between 2019 and 2023 will be 25.4%. The report also mentions that about 3.25 billion voice assistants are in use today.

The major credit of this boost in use goes to smart speakers like Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft Cortana. The popularity and charm of these magical devices have helped voice technology make its way into the mainstream.

In the infographic below, check out some figures and see how the penetration of voice assistants is visualized in the coming decade. We will also check out the different ways in which people have adopted voice assistants.

Current Use Of Voice Assistants And Estimated Rate Of Growth

As per the Juniper research, 3.25 billion voice assistants are in use today, and it will rise to about 8 billion in 2023 and the growth rate between 2019 and 2023 will be 25.4%.

Which Country Adopted Voice Tech The Most?

It is the Brits on the top rung with 60% of their population already using one of these devices.

UNITED KINGDOM

60%

UNITED STATES

58%

GERMANY

50%

U.S. Smart Speaker Market Share By Brand- January 2019

As per the Voicebot smart speaker consumer report, Google Home added 600,000 more U.S. users in 2018 than Amazon Echo, but Amazon Echo Dot is still the most owned smart speaker.

Amazon Echo Dot is the leading smart speaker by user count with a relative market
share of 31.4% of users.

UK Smart Speaker User Penetration by Brand,2018 & 2019

According to eMarketer’s inaugural forecast on smart speaker usage in the UK, in 2019, the number of smart speaker users in the UK will grow 31.6% to 12.6 million. However, Amazon’s share will decrease to 63.8%, while Google’s will increase to 29.5%. eMarketer expects this trend to continue through 2020.

Australia Smart Speaker Market
Share by Brand – January 2019

Smart speaker adoption rose to 5% of the 25 million Australians after just over six months since Google Home first landed on the continent.

Gender Breakdown of U.S. Smart Speaker Users

In terms of gender, we discovered males are more likely to own a smart speaker than females by about 15 percent.

What Do the People Like to Do Most with Voice Assistants?

People love to search for information, ask questions, check the weather and news, and play music the most.

Consumers who are using voice and text both tend to love voice search more

84%of voice, assistant users say they’d rather search via voice than by typing

Top Uses of Voice Assistants for
Information and Productivity

The Future of Voice Assistants

This adoption rate is just the beginning. It will grow as voice assistants are incorporated into more and more devices.

According to a report by Gartner, by 2020, 30% of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen.

Are You Ready to Get Your Business Voice-Enabled?

Discover how BeyondKey can help you to get your business voice optimized and voice-friendly.
Reach out to us at contact@beyondkey.com.

The post Voice Assistants: Adoption Trends and Statistics-Infographic appeared first on Beyond Key.

With the power of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning skills, conversational interfaces (chatbots) have become revolutionary. The conversational bot brought a substantial improvement in many business processes for various industry domains.

Our FAQ chatbot is an excellent voice bot that can help you streamline several of your day-to-day problems. Let’s check out some of its everyday use cases you’re sure to love.

One Conversational Bot for Industry Verticals

Chatbots in Banking

Banks have been early adopters of the newest technology that has seen widespread commercial success. A report by Juniper Research claims that for every query that a chatbot handles, banks save four minutes of an agent’s time translating per query. By 2022, this will amount to billions in yearly savings. Chatbots in the banking industry are helpful for information gathering internally amongst employees in different branches and with a vast consumer base.

Chatbots are helping banks enhance customer satisfaction by answering a host of their queries within seconds. Bots answer common questions regarding account balance, utility payments, balance transfer, ATM locations, and more in a seamless and time-bound manner. With predictive analytics, the bots pick up the customer’s intent and answer accordingly. Also, some banks have developed bots that help customers block their cards instantly in case of theft or misuse. They ask specific questions about the card and send an OTP to the registered mobile number. Once fed, the card gets blocked instantly. With uninterrupted support 24/7, chatbots are creating meaningful customer relationships.

Chatbots in e-commerce

Behind the scenes of every popular online shopping website is a complex network of activities such as customer service, payments, promotions, tech support, logistics, market research, and more. Chatbots have become the only solution to all these complex problems of online retailers and marketplaces. Customers have numerous questions about shipping and delivery, both before and after making their purchases.

Building chatbots for e-commerce websites allow online stores to provide their potential and existing customers with information and updates on shipping and delivery. Generic and frequently asked questions on shipping can be fed into the chat script and give instant answers to the customers who request them. In addition to this, the online chatbots can extract real-time tracking information on any order and update existing customers on the status of their shipment, answer basic queries and complaints, and upsell and cross-sell products. They can also quickly deal with issues like cart abandonment with regular follow-ups.

Chatbots in Healthcare

 These days, chatbots are being used by leading health systems to facilitate a fully conversational discovery of their services and enable seamless time scheduling for their patients. Chatbots also help by presenting a quick way of checking a patient’s existing coverage, filing claims, and tracking the status of their claims. There are Medicine Reminders chatbots that can be easily programmed to remind patients to take medication. For pathology labs, a conversational chatbot let users instantly check the status of their pending reports, find nearby centers, show test information and prices, and enable faster query resolution by guiding the user through every step.

Chatbots in Education

Learning Through Chatbots provides a personalized learning environment to the students by analyzing their responses and how they go through the learning content. The bot may repeatedly assess the student’s level of understanding and present the next part of the lecture accordingly.

Chatbot’s instant messaging system makes it easy for the students to find information about the admission processes, assignments, due dates, or other important events. The bots answer students’ queries about the course module, lesson plans, projects, and deadlines to monitor the students’ learning progress. The chatbots provide personalized feedback to the students. They can analyze the students learning needs and recommend the learning content to them accordingly.

Chatbots for Travel

Chatbots can be a game-changer for the travel industry as they benefit both travelers and companies; they help both parties simplify the travel agreements. Travel chatbots are also enhancing the customer travel experience by guiding customers through every aspect related to travel.

Not only can they be used to book flights, but you can also find hotels, get general travel advice, book a rental car, and more. If you have a set budget, you can ask the messenger chatbot to recommend options within a specific price range. It can also update you with real-time changes such as flight delays, check-in details, and more.

Travelers also expect customer support services irrespective of their time zone, especially during international travels. Chatbots provide 24/7 customer service support to users to fulfill their needs and improve customer service.

Chatbot for Customer Support

Gone are the days when customers would file a complaint or question and wait until a human agent replied. With the advent of chatbots, customer support has mandatorily become a need of “being present 24/7”. An AI conversational bot understands human language and respond accordingly. Corporations train them with prequalified questions and answers such as invoice management, order tracking, and account management. These are simple and repetitive tasks that do not require the added value that humans bring. By prequalifying requests, managing simple questions, and routing customers to the right services, bots also allow support agents to focus on more complex tasks, improving efficiency and simplifying processes.

Live chat apps offer a cheaper alternative to help you cut down on team numbers and provide excellent customer service by tracking customer contact histories and providing people with immediate, non-urgent support.

Chatbot for Sales

Chatbots are trained to take instant real-time online orders and even help your customers with the product they want.

You also don’t need to worry about these chatbots giving cold and impersonal responses. Studies show that 45 percent of consumers don’t care who they are talking to as long as they get correct, practical, and handled quickly.

The quick response times that automated messengers offer can also be valuable during regular business hours. If a salesperson has inquiries from multiple clients at a time, they can’t provide immediate responses to all of them. Chatbots, on the other hand, can.  The bot could remind the individual it’s time for subscription renewal or send them marketing or informational materials. Based on the person’s purchase history, the bot can also suggest other items that might interest them. They can help you turn leads into customers more efficiently and provide you with data to inform your marketing and sales efforts.

And that’s not all!

Apart from this, chatbots can help sort time-consuming internal communications in a company that HR typically handles. Bots can streamline the entire process of communication, leaving no room for mistakes. Chatbots can schedule appointments, respond to frequent employee queries in a blink, and even entertain them!

Need help with a Conversational Bot?

With so many capabilities, you may think that implementing a chatbot is an expensive project. But think again! Chatbots can be very cost-effective if you hire the best talent. Researchers say that investment in chatbot technology is highly value-driven. And the icing on the cake? You don’t have to know coding or any programming language!

Want to know how you can build your FAQ conversational bot for free? Click here right now- contact@beyondkey.com

The post It’s About One Conversational Bot…for All Industry Verticals appeared first on Beyond Key.

The pace at which people have started accepting chatbots in their day-to-day life compels us to look to the future of this cutting-edge technology. Artificial Intelligence, NLP, machine learning and voice chatbots: all of them have given a serious boost to chatbots and made them smarter day by day. We are already comparing the way chatbots are now made responsive just like any human being, but does that mean we’ll soon see Chatbots replace humans? Well, the answer will always be ‘no.’ Humans have created chatbots and the technology which makes them work, and that will always be like that.

Chatbots have seen their increased acceptability in almost all industry verticals. More and more consumers are raising inclination towards the use of chatbots. The developmental trends of 2019 suggest that chatbots will be prepared to easily offer services which were previously only performed by human beings.

Let’s understand the 9 most probable trends for the development of chatbots in 2019.

1. Chatbots bringing revolution in technology and reach

Besides hand held devices and mobile phones, Chatbots have marked their presence on almost all social media channels and are now integrated with voice-based assistants like Alexa and Google Home. Enterprises are finding them an efficient and cost-effective way to give customer support around the clock. With advancement in technology like Machine Learning, chatbot training has become so automated and easy that they are becoming smarter. Artificial intelligence has given capability to chatbots to think somewhat like humans and NLP has made them understand human tone so well!

2. Voice chatbots making a big show

No one wants to type or read long messy sentences for a simple answer. Voice is the simple answer to this problem. Voice chatbots have been devised so customers don’t need to type in their questions or read out long sentences searching for their specific questions. Our Beyond Key Voice chatbot has also been developed with the same ability of talking. You can simply feed in your questions as an audio input and get an answer as audio output. Check out our voice chatbot features here.

3. Voice Chatbot more responsive as human beings

With the advancement of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in today’s world, chatbot services are becoming more human-like and impeccable. Machine Learning skills have empowered bots with smooth training processes. Training of dumb chatbots has become so easy that companies do not mind investing in training bots rather than people! At least, they don’t resign after so much hard work!

On top of this, NLP has given a new edge to these robots. They can now listen to your voice commands in any accent and try to understand what you are talking about. If they find a suitable answer, they speak out or else abort the process or move you to a human agent for further conversation.

4. Machine learning utilized to next level

Ever wonder how Google and Facebook are always ready with ideas that interest you? With the integration of Machine Learning, chatbots are also built to understand your likings, needs, and requirements. Complete human-like conversation might not be in the cards soon, but with the integration of Machine Learning to build neural conversational agents, Voice Chatbots will be able to do more than just set alarms and make calls.

As the chatbots learn and act, companies can look forward to greater customer satisfaction and improved interaction. With chatbots adapting to the customer’s mood, revenues are bound to increase.

5. Flawless user experience due to NLP

Natural Language Programming (NLP) aids in providing a human experience and making chatbots interactive. They are empowered to easily understand questions with multiple utterances or the same question put forth in different ways.

Q: What is your age?

Q: How old are you?

The answer to both these questions is the same, but NLP helps the chatbot to understand the intent of the user and reply accordingly.

6. Bots for every industry vertical

Chatbots have been used in every industry and business for serving various purposes. Be it the banking industry to retail and consumer goods or education, healthcare, travel and tourism industry to big corporations trying to streamline their complex business process, Chatbots have found their space in virtually every industry domain and process.

Banks have enabled their customers to interact with chatbots to clarify banking queries. They can access and ask for account balances, bank statements, to transfer funds, create a deposit, saving and investment advice, and so on. People could use bots as personal fashion advisors for clothing recommendations, or ask trading tips from a finance bot, suggest places to visit from a travel bot, and so forth. Chatbots can sell your products for you because they’re online 24/7. Some chatbots are simply meant to quickly answer customers’ questions like FAQs.

At BeyondKey, we have also developed a FAQ Chatbot which can help you with quick responses in no time and help you save hours of customer support with lots of bucks as well.

7. Voice Bots replacing apps

This is particularly a thing of future. Virtual assistants are becoming more and more common. Just ask people whether they prefer to speak to Google or Siri to find or open something or going to the app and finding the information by texting. The answer with be speaking to Voice assistants or chatbots!

While the idea might seem a little farfetched right now, apps may start to become a thing of the past. This change almost certainly wouldn’t be a sudden one that everyone would have to adhere to at once, but the time is coming. For some people, apps have already phased out as chatbots become more reliable. So while the future of apps is uncertain, for Voice chatbots, it’s something to talk about loudly.

8. Chatbots present on every social media platform

Enterprises have understood one thing very well that now consumer demands have changed. They want you to be there where and when consumers are living with questions.

Social media presence makes you versatile, so our Chatbots are present on every social media platform available. Our chatbot developers have given the integration ability of chatbots with your fav social media sites, like websites, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Teams, Slack, Viber, Line, Telegram, Kik, Mobile SDK, and many more coming soon.

9. Chatbots giving new edge to customer support and answering simple questions

Chatbots are extremely helpful when customers are looking to solve simple tasks like changing passwords, answering basic questions from a FAQ list, or searching for a specific product from the huge product range of an online seller. Customers are excited to engage with robots especially when they exhibit some sense of humor or a personality that’s similar to a real human.

When you program your chatbot well, it can respond to customers’ messages instantly using your brand’s voice.

Happy to help!

BeyondKey has been exploring the vertical of conversational AI for many years now. With our adept team of developers, we have proudly helped clients in different verticals maintain their chatbots, from answering simple questions to customizing conversation flows. If you are an enterprise looking to implement voice chatbots, our team of experts would be happy to listen to your idea and help. Reach out to us for more information.

The post 9 Amazing Trends in Voice Chatbot to Watch in 2019 appeared first on Beyond Key.

With acquisition of a vast amount of knowledge in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms, and with their day by day smart usage, possibilities of enhancement on any of your modern applications are just tremendous. Azure Cognitive services are icing on the cake!

Since its inception, Microsoft Azure has always bagged so much into its kitty. And talking in particular about Azure Cognitive Services, the overall experience is just amazing! With smart use of APIs available in cognitive services, you can infuse your apps, websites and bots with intelligent algorithms to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret your user needs through natural methods of communication.

With Azure Cognitive Services’ APIs, it becomes so easy to enhance your applications in 5 areas: vision, speech, language, knowledge and search, so you can take advantage of the possibilities that AI has to offer.

Let us understand in detail as what these APIs are offering us:

Vision

Vision makes it possible for apps and services to accurately identify and analyze content within images and videos. Providing APIs through which developers can process the image, either by uploading it or providing the image URL to analyze visual content to extract information.

1. Content Moderator

This features helps with the identification of explicit or offensive content moderation for images and videos. It makes sure we are displaying appropriate content in videos.

2. Computer Vision

This feature returns information about visual content found in an image, like a celebrity or landmark, scene and activity recognition, optical character recognition, and handwriting recognition.

3. Facial Recognition

It detects a human face with high precision face location in the image. It also detects facial attributes, gender, age, pose, hair, and more. It also helps in emotion and similar face recognition and grouping in images. It is extremely helpful with security and identity management.

4. Custom Vision

This service provides us with an API through which we can upload an image, build and train a custom image classifier.

5. Video Indexer

It is built using Azure Media Analytics, Cognitive Services, and Azure Search. It extracts information like speaker indexing, video/audio text recognition, object, scene and activity detection, translation, audio and key frame extraction, analysis and more.

Speech

Speech enables the integration of speech processing capabilities into any app or service. Convert spoken language into text or produce natural sounding speech from text using standard (or customizable) voice fonts.

1. Speech Translation

This provides real time speech to text translation in various languages on the fly as well as automated and Customizable translation.

2. Speaker Recognition

This is mainly used for speaker verification and identification

3. Speech-to-Text APIs

It allows automatic and customizable speech recognition and speech transcription (speech-to-text), as well as Customizable speech models for unique vocabularies or accents.

4. Text-to-Speech APIs

It allows Automatic and Customizable speech recognition and speech transcription (text- to- speech), as well as Customizable speech models for unique vocabularies or accents.

Language

Language services ensure that apps and services can understand the meaning of unstructured text or recognize the intent behind a speaker’s utterances.

1. Bing spell check

This API focusses on Web-scale, multi-lingual spell check and contextual grammar.

2. LUIS

Language Understanding Service processes the user’s natural conversational language and understands it to figure out the overall meaning for fetching relevant information.

3. Text Analytics

It works on text data and functions such as name, sentiment analysis, language detection, and key phrase extraction.

4. Translator Text

This API translates text in near real-time for more than sixty languages. It also supports Automatic language detection and text translation.

5. Linguistic Analysis

An NLP tool for identifying the structure of text such as sentence separation, tokenization, and parts of speech tagging.

Knowledge

It creates rich knowledge resources that can be integrated into apps and services with Knowledge services.

1.QnA Maker

This provides a service which helps in Knowledge creation from collections of Q&As. Q&A can also be extracted from unstructured text.

2. Custom Decision Service

This is a contextual decision-making API which creates the intelligent app and helps in Semantic matching for knowledge bases. It converts content for further processing for machine learning and tries to understand it in terms of an image, video, text, and more.

Search

Enable apps and services to harness the power of a web-scale, ad-free search engine with Search.

1. Bing News Search

This news search API provides ad-free news search results from a search query to Bing News. It also helps in the identification of trending topics.

2. Bing Web Search

 This API provides results which are location-based, ad-free and safe. They may include an image, video, web page, or news.

3. Bing Visual Search

This API helps the user in Identification of similar images and products, Websource identification and in Knowledge acquisition from images.

4. Bing Video Search

This is a video search engine which gives Ad Free Video search results from Bing Videos as well as also provide video topic and trend identification.

5. Bing Entity Search

This API mainly returns local results with named entity or classification like popular persons, hotels, restaurants, and more.

6. Bing Custom Search

It enables the developer to create tailored search experiences for specific topics and ad-free results.

7. Bing Image Search

This API returns with searched images related to a query search.

8. Bing Autosuggest

This API comes up with a list of suggested queries based on the partial query string the user enters in the search box.

Conclusion

Learning more and more about Azure Cognitive Services is interesting in itself. These services are very promising for anyone who is depending on ready-to-use APIs and wants to enhance and expand their applications, bringing the benefits of AI and Machine Learning into the products. These services are a perfect example as to why you should use the cloud and its intelligent services.

At Beyond Key, we have a team of Azure Cloud and services experts who have been busy infusing apps, websites, and chatbots with intelligent algorithms and building masterpiece applications. If you have any questions or a project idea in mind, we are just a message away! Contact us here or schedule a demo with one of our cloud experts, and we will get back to you in less than one business day.

The post The Future of Apps Lies with Azure Cognitive Services appeared first on Beyond Key.

In today’s world, there is more voice-based communication and collaboration happening than ever. People are no longer only typing now. They have speech-to-text transcription applications on their smart devices that allow them to transcribe everything they say. While speech recognition and transcription isn’t a new phenomenon, they have undergone a great deal of transformation over the years. The players in this domain who have been working hard in making this happen have achieved a great deal of accuracy in the technology recently.

There are several systems available that differ in capabilities, with some only able to recognize a selection of words and phrases. But the most advanced transcription software can understand natural speech and also provide its own accuracy measure. Yes, we’re talking about the speech-to-text capabilities of four big players: IBM Watson, Google Speech-to-Text, Amazon Transcribe, and Microsoft Azure Speech-to-Text.

Speech-to-text transcription technology has allowed developers to power voice response systems virtually everywhere, from call centers to financial institutions, hospitals to education institutes. Developers can also enable the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to talk back to users and convert text-based media into a spoken format. Businesses have started finding the best possible use case of speech-to-text technology in their own scenarios and leveraging the capability of these giants who are increasingly interested in bringing their Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools to the enterprise.

At Beyond Key, our voice technology expert Vishal Gupte dove deep to find out which of the four players carved the niche and offered the best version of this technology. To understand it better, let’s take a look at the matrix below which gives a quick glimpse of the features offered by each of these companies:

Features	IBM Watson	Google Speech-to-Text	Amazon Transcribe	Azure Speech-to-Text API
Speech Recognition
Real-time Speech Recognition			–
Keyword Spotting in Audio		–	–	–
Speaker Identification		Beta		–
Languages Supported	English (US), English (UK), Japanese, Arabic, Mandarin, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, French, Korean	120 languages and variants	English(US) and Spanish	Different languages are supported for different Speech service functions; total of 30 languages supported as of now
Multichannel Recognition	–			–
Accuracy
Confidence Score	(word wise)	(word wise)	(word wise)	(transcription wise)
Start/End Time per Word				–
Noise Robustness	–		–	–
Vocabulary
Custom Vocabulary		(known as phrase hints)
Profanity Filtering			–	–
Smart Formatting
Punctuation		(Beta)
Support
Video Support	–			–
Audio Formats Supported	WebM with the Opus or Vorbis codec, MP3, WAV, FLAC, PCM, u-law audio, and basic audio	All audio formats	FLAC, MP3, MP4, or WAV file format	WAV
REST API Support
Account & Pricing
New Account Needed	IBM Cloud Account	Cloud Platform Account	AWS Account	Azure Account
Free Trail	30 minutes for 30 days (Lite Plan)	0-60 minutes free	60 minutes per month for 12 months	5 hours per month
Pricing	$0.02 USD/minute	Over 60 minutes, up to 1 million minutes Audio: $0.006 USD /15 seconds Video: $0.012 USD /15 seconds	$0.0004 USD per second	$1 USD per hour

Real-Time Speech Recognition

IBM Watson, Google Speech-to-Text and Azure Speech-to-Text have been found to be the most powerful in recognizing speech in real time. While using the Amazon Transcribe API, you can analyze audio files stored in Amazon S3 and have the service return a text file of the transcribed speech as a whole.

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text conversion is powered by machine learning. Its Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is powered by deep learning neural networking, making it work with more accuracy in real-time.

IBM Watson is also good at keyword spots when working in real-time. It has a highly accurate speech engine. It recognizes different speakers in your audio and spots specified keywords in real-time with high accuracy and confidence. The service leverages artificial intelligence to transcribe the human voice accurately. It identifies the composition of the audio signal with the help of information about grammar and language structure. With the machine learning skills embedded, it also continuously updates the transcription as more speech is heard.

Multiple Speakers and Channel Recognition

IBM Watson and Transcribe both have shown a good response when multiple speakers are involved in any conversation. While Cloud Speech-to-Text has included this feature in its Beta release, Watson has started giving labels to different speakers. Amazon Transcribe also recognizes when the speaker changes and attributes the transcribed text appropriately. This can significantly reduce the amount of work needed to transcribe audio with multiple speakers for telephone calls, meetings, and television shows.Amazon Transcribe and Cloud Speech-to-Text are also built to recognize multiple channels. Whether speakers are connected to the conference through an audio, video, or any other channel, the system identifies each channel and produces a single transcript with annotated channel labels. Both IBM Watson and Google Cloud Speech-to-Text are well trained in understanding audio from phone calls and videos.

Transcription: How it Works

Understanding Languages

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text is the best when it comes to language supports. It recognizes 120 languages and variants. You can also filter inappropriate content in text results for all languages. While IBM Watson is trained to understand 9 languages, Azure Speech-to-Text can do it for 30 and Transcribe is still learning with just two languages. Similar to Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, IBM Watson can also identify and point out profanity text.

Building Custom Vocabulary

Another important component of speech-to-text transcribing systems is getting trained or accustomed to supporting a particular business model. Luckily, all four systems have this excellent ability to train the software with custom vocabulary.

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text has a feature called Phrase Hints. This feature allows you to train your speech-to-text engine to understand custom words and phrases that are likely to be spoken. This is especially useful when the application is used for a technical use-case such as in hospitals, courtrooms, call centers, research labs, and more.

Transcribe also gives you the ability to expand the base vocabulary of the application with new words and generate highly-accurate transcriptions specific to your use cases, including product names, domain-specific terminology, and names of individuals.

IBM Watson’s Speech-to-Text service helps you go deeper than out-of-the-box solutions by providing the tooling and functionality to train Watson to learn the language of your business. New language model customization, customization weighting, and acoustic model customization features provide the flexibility you need to create effective solutions for your unique domain needs.

Azure Speech-to-text also allows for the creation of custom language models tailored to users’ speaking styles, industry expressions, and technical, geographical or market terms. Through integration with Language Understanding (LUIS), you can derive intents and entities from speech. Users don’t have to know your app’s vocabulary but can describe what they want in their own words.

Punctuation and Formatting

While all the systems claim to have developed an accurate punctuation ability, Google Cloud Speech-to-Text has recently worked on a new punctuation model. Google promises that its new model results in far more readable transcriptions that feature fewer run-on sentences and more commas, periods and question marks.

Amazon Transcribe uses deep learning to add punctuation and formatting automatically so that the output is more intelligible and can be used without any further editing. The system improves its accuracy with each use and training.

IBM Watson has worked on punctuation, as well as formatting needs. It can easily convert dates, times, numbers, phone numbers, and currency values into more readable, conventional forms in final transcripts of U.S. English audio.

Azure Speech-to-Text is tailored to work well with real-life speech and can accurately transcribe proper nouns (such as Sundar Pichai) and appropriately format language (such as dates and phones numbers).

Accuracy

A great feature all of these systems share is that they have the capability to measure their own accuracy of the transcription. While IBM Watson, Cloud Speech-to-Text and Amazon Transcribe have the ability to generate a Confidence Score for every single word, Azure’s Confidence Score is returned back from the service if you specify a detailed output on the speech configuration object.

Other than this, the new and improved Cloud Speech-to-Text API promises significantly improved voice recognition performance. The new API promises a reduction in word errors of about 54 percent across all of Google’s tests, but in some areas, the results are even better.

Amazon Transcribe is designed to provide accurate and automated transcripts for a wide range of audio quality. You can generate subtitles for any video or audio file, and even transcribe low-quality telephone recordings, such as customer service calls.

Noise Robustness

Google Cloud Speech-to-Text is the only system developed to handle noisy audio or background noise from many environments without requiring additional noise cancellation.

Similarly, with IBM Watson you can expect control of background noise to some extent with custom acoustic models and match your users’ expected environments.

Big Picture Benefit

The biggest benefit of all of these cloud providers is that they provide APIs which are platform independent and can directly be used to integrate with any platform of tools and services on which they run. Necessary to mention here is all four players are providing their cloud APIs. Techies have already started leveraging these capabilities into timesaving apps for a range of uses, including call center analytics, video indexing services, web conference indexing, and business transcription workflows.

Development Support

Amazon Transcribe enables developers to submit transcription requests via a standard REST interface which supports several formats, including WAV, MP3, MP4 and FLAC. It does, however, require Amazon S3 URL, so all files (audio/video) should be saved on S3 first. Then call “StartTranscriptionJob” AP, with S3 URL in “MediaFileUri” parameter.

For Azure Speech-to-Text API, developers can access it from any app using a REST API. In addition, Microsoft developed several client libraries to improve integration with various apps written in C#, Java, JavaScript and Objective-C. In some cases, client apps use the WebSocket protocol to improve performance. Currently, the service supports 29 languages, as well as WAV and Opus audio formats.

Google Cloud supports audio formats such as FLAC, AMR, PCMU and WAV files. Also, SDKs are available for C#, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python and Ruby.

The IBM Watson Speech-to-Text service provides APIs that use IBM’s speech-recognition capabilities to produce transcripts of spoken audio. The audio format supported is WebM with the Opus or Vorbis codec, MP3, WAV, FLAC, PCM, u-law audio, and basic audio.For most languages, the service supports two sampling rates: broadband and narrowband. It returns all JSON response content in the UTF-8 character set.

For speech recognition, the service supports synchronous and asynchronous HTTP Representational State Transfer (REST) interfaces. It also supports a WebSocket interface that provides a full-duplex, low-latency communication channel (clients send requests and audio to the service and receive results over a single connection asynchronously).

Who’s the Best?

Although speech-to-text technology has not been perfected yet, we still see a great opportunity open for all four players in this technology. It’s a close call when it comes to developing custom vocabulary and training these applications with machine learning and deep learning skills. All the players have done a great job and are improving day by day. Still, if we want to choose one amongst the four, clearly Google Cloud Speech-to-Text is our first choice. Although some features like “Speaker Detection” and “Multichannel Recognition” are still in Beta with Cloud Speech-to-Text, these features work perfectly with IBM Watson and Amazon Transcribe. As far as accuracy is concerned, Google Speech API produces quite remarkable transcriptions for audio fragments even with considerable background noise. Their language support, punctuation, phrase hints, and many other features have definitely surpassed others in the race.

This conclusion is valid based on information and testing done on date for Speech-to-text technology only. This can change in the coming weeks or months or years, as every provider i.e. Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google etc. are working extensively on improving this with advancement in AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities. The intense research and development by each of the company brings value to the developer working on it, and also helps to create more convenient tools and applications for the masses. We are open for feedback from anyone and we would be glad to update our findings and release new findings soon.

To conclude, developers have a huge benefit here. These AI-infused speech-to-text apps have created a complete path for developers to build dictation applications that can automatically generate transcriptions for audio files, as well as captions for video files. They should incorporate these tools into workflows that complement human transcribers.

Looking for a transcription solution?

Have a business use case which you want to implement on Voice technology? You are at the right place! Contact us now to discuss your project.

The post Speech-to-Text Technology appeared first on Beyond Key.

Voice technology is well on its way to changing the healthcare industry due to its super convenient interface and early adoption of users in the field. Let’s understand what all the possible use cases are where big giants in medicine and other domains have been leveraging this exciting future of voice technology.

The adoption trend is going both ways. At one end, where more and more patients are finding it easier to use voice-activated devices such as Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Home, many hospitals and health systems are also developing voice-activated tools for patients. We can definitively say that users are really making this a successful attempt.

On the other end, technology experts are also leaving no stone unturned. They are constantly working on improving the quality of voice recognition software. Other than this, developers are also busy finding creative voice technology solutions to help people manage their medical conditions, whether acute or chronic.

We can surely call it a win-win situation for patients, clinicians, and technology experts. Improvements in speech recognition technology and decreasing device prices present exciting opportunities for medical organizations. As voice technology grows more sophisticated, patients can engage with their health at home through voice-assisted IoT.

Voice assistants are becoming a part of procedure rooms. What are the benefits to doctors?

We can call it a boon that voice is a touchless interface and that makes it super easy to integrate into a sterile environment like an operating or procedure room.

Technology experts have achieved a great deal of success while integrating voice assistants like Alexa, Google Home, or Cortana to Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the hospitals. So surgeons can easily pull up past records of patients they will be operating on to get a better understanding of how they are going to respond to the procedure.

Doctors can talk to each other using headset mics which are integrated with voice assistants. When they speak into their headsets, the message is transmitted to voice assistants which, in turn, pull up the required report, information, or anything else and show it on the big screen in the operating or procedure room.

Voice Assistants are crucial in recording and updating EHRs. How?

Advances in AI, Machine Learning, Big Data, and Cloud Computing are helping to drive the implementation of voice technologies in updating healthcare records. Accurate speech-to-text programs have shown the ability to transcribe physicians’ notes more accurately than the average human medical transcriptionist, and voice recognition models offer a method for reducing common issues like illegible handwriting and insufficient documentation of procedures.

Another important role that voice assistant can play in operating rooms or even in any physician’s room is capturing clinical notes. This helps doctors save a lot of time writing prescriptions or recording complete medical histories of any patients suffering from chronic diseases and focus on their patients rather than their EMRs.

 Role in Forecasting Wait Times in Emergency Rooms

Hospitals and nursing homes are also experimenting with building skills for Alexa and Google Home which can help patients identify wait times at emergency rooms and urgent care centers that are near a given zip code.

You can ask Alexa for the shortest wait time near your zip code or check the time at a specific location. The skill will give you the wait time as well as the address for that location or direct you to an alternative if the shortest wait time is elsewhere. This gives patients immediate access to emergency rooms and urgent care centers.

Voice Technology’s Inevitable Use in Recovery Rooms

Voice assistants have become an inevitable part of the patient recovery system. Whether it’s staying in a hospital room, or after discharging a patient to recover at home, voice interfaces help patients connect into their environment, especially when they have restricted mobility. Beginning with simple tasks such as dimming lights, adjusting the temperature of a room, and controlling volume levels, voice can empower users to maintain control of their environment. Moving to more integrated options, voice can also order food, request nursing assistance, or find out more about your medical condition from trusted sources using various health apps.

Devices such as Alexa are also well-suited to help people manage their chronic conditions. By asking simple questions such as “have you taken your medication today?” Alexa and other platforms can help ensure that patients remain compliant with their treatment needs. This is critically important, as some studies have shown up to 50 percent of patients do not comply with their dosing schedule, a problem that has massive public health consequences.

Future of Voice Technology and Assistants

As vocal recognition technology continues to mature and become more widely adopted, the level of acceptability and adoption in the Healthcare industry is surely going to increase. Medical organizations already have tech teams busy building pilot programs that use devices like the Amazon Echo to provide post-discharge information for patients, answer common health questions, and manage basic needs like transportation and medication schedules.

Voice recognition is also likely to take on a more expanded role in the daily routines of healthcare providers, potentially making the laborious human transcription process and paper-based records outdated as speech recognition becomes even more exact and reliable.

Though security, trust, and the adoption rate is a common challenge, vocal recognition is still the future of healthcare. The help these smart speakers adorned with Artificial Intelligence can provide in emergency and operating rooms to patients and doctors alike are monumental. Widespread adoption could slash operating costs and save time, allowing doctors to see more patients and focus on delivering high-quality care.

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