A recent white paper from lyrix.com, entitled “Why Every Enterprise Needs a VoIP High Quality Speech Enabled Auto Attendant,” does a good job demonstrating why, with growing bandwidth and the ubiquity of SIP, “it is finally feasible to deliver high quality speech applications from the cloud.”
There are good business reasons to automate some or all of your call answering -- but the spelling of names on a DTMF keypad can be tricky or impossible on some smartphones and is illegal (and dangerous) while driving.
What you need is a high quality speech-enabled auto attendant, which its supporters would even describe as “prohibitively expensive and technically challenging,” involving premised-based installation of a dedicated server and expensive speech recognition licenses.
But now there are hosted, cloud-based products, making them much more affordable for all. High-quality hosted, business class VoIP offerings proliferate, as the paper notes over 1,000 VoIP providers in the United States alone.
That’s a lot. So how do they stand out from one another? Service. Hosted VoIP providers are “aggressively seeking to add new applications to their VoIP offerings,” the paper notes, adding that IP-PBX (News - Alert) resellers are also seeking to add ongoing value for their customers by delivering value added services.”
Deployment of a speech-enabled auto attendant has generally been technically challenging and costly, and removing these barriers by cloud products has enabled small and medium businesses access to the speech-enabled auto attendant previously only available to large enterprises with deep pockets.
New cloud-based products, in fact, now make available speech recognition at an affordable price “to even the smallest and most distributed businesses,” the paper says, “allowing those enterprises to deliver a highly polished and consistent experience to the caller.”
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Tammy Wolf