There are a few areas in the voice communications industry that I think are extremely volatile. Speech recognition is one of those. It's a niche that hasn't yet really taken off, but is a quiet hive of activity among many companies working feverishly to bring the hottest new solutions to market.

With the rising power of processors, coupled with fast, cheap memory, and dwindling costs, speech recognition is one of the next logical springboards for computing, mobile computing and telecommunications service to make an exponential leap forward.

Here's a release about some of what's going on in speech recognition. Kudos to Telephonetics VIP. They just popped onto my watch list.

Telephonetics VIP uses speech recognition to reduce wasted resource with Remind+

In an industry first, Telephonetics VIP has released an automated notification solution based on speech recognition technology. The automation specialist has released the Beta version of Remind+, a solution that enables organisations to contact people and remind them they have an appointment in the near future and logs their spoken responses, enabling unused slots to be speedily reallocated.

Missed appointments can cost organisations millions of pounds each year. For example, in the NHS, 10% of appointments set each year are not attended resulting in an estimated annual loss of over £600 million, an average of £130 per missed appointment.

It is worth noting these costs are not limited to the public sector and Remind+ is equally productive for organisations in the private sector such as legal, finance and private health professions.

In addition to making outbound calls, Remind+ also records a response to the information provided using speech recognition enabling organisations to re-allocate an appointment or resource that is no longer required, thus improving efficiency and potentially increasing revenues. The solution is always polite and always retries calling contacts until successful, using configurable calling times and numbers to suit the scenario.

By using speech recognition, the solution is very user friendly thereby encouraging the called party to respond to the notification and increasing the number of successful reminders or appropriate re-allocation of resources

Remind+ includes extensive reporting capabilities, is complementary to existing phone systems and is designed with low administration requirements.

Mike Matthews, Head of Product Management, Telephonetics VIP explained "Missed appointments and events are expensive and a waste of resource. In line with our commitment to facilitate improved service for customers, Remind+ provides organisations with a cost effective method of reducing waste whilst enabling staff to carry out more productive and less mundane tasks."

Telephonetics VIP
Telephonetics VIP, which is part of Telephonetics plc, is a leading provider of hosted and customer premises speech recognition and voice automation solutions.

Offering diverse automation solutions and deployed across 20,000 telephony channels, Telephonetics VIP uniquely processes over 35 million minutes of speech recognition per annum, via its carrier class Voice XML hosting platform and customer premises solutions.

Drawing on over 14 years of understanding how people converse over the telephone, Telephonetics VIP offers a broad range of customer-focused solutions, covering even the most demanding environments, and delivering real business benefits to all its customers.

With innovative solutions for speech self-service, mobility, outbound messaging, emergency notification and business continuity, Telephonetics VIP has built a global network of customers, including 80% of the major UK multiplex cinemas and over 50% of the NHS Acute Health Trusts, along with a significant number of Global 1000 financial services companies.

TELEPHONETICS PLC
Telephonetics plc (TPH.L) is a UK-based speech recognition solutions company. The Group was listed on the London Stock Exchange's AIM market in July 2005.