Hosted IVR

July 28, 2012

TMCnet Hosted IVR Week in Review

By Erin Harrison
Executive Editor, Cloud Computing

As the world of voice technology continues to expand and evolve from legacy to hosted systems, it’s essential to understand how you can optimize your business with voice recognition and speech analytics by applying hosted IVR to your call or contact center. Needless to say, businesses need to examine their IVR services for improved performance in this ever-changing CRM space. A lot has been happening this week in the hosted IVR industry, so let’s jump right into it, shall we?

There is a growing demand for more hosted IVR solutions including both unified communications and other cloud and VoIP technology. According to yet another market report, both UC services and hosted IP telephony are driving the growth that is expected to seek a huge jump in the next four years. ?

The report, summarized in this Telecom Reseller (News - Alert) piece, suggests that customers are taking notice of the multiple benefits that cloud and hosted solutions are offering. Between 2011 and 2018, research group Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) estimates that the number of UC services and hosted IP telephone users will increase not only in actual lines and end users, but revenue too. To read details of the report, click here.

In other hosted IVR news this week, Providence Health & Services, with 64,000 people in five states, Alaska, California, Montana, Oregon and Washington, will deploy speech recognition technology across the healthcare system to 8,000 clinicians in 27 hospitals and 250 clinics.

Providence Health selected Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance (News - Alert) Communications for its Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition. The deployment will support Providence's Epic electronic health record system for the clinical staff to document and navigate the EHR by speaking.

Designed exclusively for hospitals and large practices using Citrix-based EHRs, Dragon Medical 360 Network Edition improves the physician dictation experience and allows IT departments to manage large-scale Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition user populations. To read more about the deployment, click here.

Voice recognition technology for services like hosted IVR has come a long way in the past few years. However, according to blogger B.K. Winstead, voice recognition falls short in understanding an aspect of speech called prosody.

For this reason, Microsoft (News - Alert) is pairing up with the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), an independent institute affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley, to begin research on improving the understanding of prosody by voice recognition interfaces, reported TMCnet’s Jacqueline Lee.

Winstead compares prosody to the music of language. The dictionary defines prosody as “the stress and intonation patterns of an utterance.” In other words, prosody communicates the intent behind what we say, whether we choose to emphasize certain words or to adopt a certain inflection in our speech. Microsoft Research personnel have worked on a project called Natural User Interface, which led to the gesture-based Kinnect interface for Windows. To read more about this development, click here.

For more Hosted IVR news, be sure to visit TMCnet again next week for all the latest developments.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

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