nVoq's SayIt Speech Recognition Solution Now Available in Canada

By Michael Guta
Contributing Writer

Speech recognition technology is now so advanced that it is more accurate and much faster than human beings. The study just released by Stanford University, the University of Washington and Baidu, revealed the software they were using had an error rate that was 20.4 percent lower than humans typing on a keyboard in English. For Mandarin Chinese, it was 63.4 percent lower. The general availability of SayIt, the speech recognition solution from nVoq, in Canada will give users in that country a platform hosted on Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure so they won't have to download any software on their devices to use the technology.

Founded in 2000 by technology entrepreneur Charles Corfield, nVoq has been making headway in the healthcare and customer care industries because of the accuracy in which the platform is able to recognize spoken words.

Using Microsoft Azure will give nVoq the infrastructure of a global company so it can increase the capability of SayIt so it can be readily available on any connected device at all times. The service will be hosted in Microsoft Azure’s Canada Central data center in Ontario.

“For some time, we’ve been interested in expanding our channel sales partner network in Canada. With Microsoft Azure, we feel confident we can offer our reseller partners, and ultimately their customers, a reliable, economical and effective alternative to other speech recognition products,” said Debbi Gillotti, VP/GM of nVoq’s Healthcare business unit. 

The SayIt platform provides solutions for different industries to address their specific needs, including enterprises, healthcare, field services, customer care, legal and law enforcement. The cloud-based system supports dictation and voice-automated command and control to provide hands-free access to computing devices and converting spoken words into action for each industry.

The legal version, for example, is able to capture relevant document sections, create briefs, navigate templates and generate emails. As for the customer care version, it improves the productivity of contact centers with automation tools so agents can interact with customers with their voice instead of using a keyboard.

In addition to these industries, SayIt can be applied in other workflow environments to increase productivity and improve the level of efficiency of the workforce by eliminating touch/keystrokes.

As the study by Stanford pointed out, the technology is evolving at such a fast rate it is only a matter of time before the keyboard becomes obsolete. And the solution nVoq provides with SayIt is one of the platforms hastening that obsolescence.