A lot has been going on in the interactive voice response (IVR) space. From new releases to the latest trends and insights, this is where you’ll find all of the most interesting IVR-related news of the week!

This week, TechNavio, a research firm covering a variety of technological industries, predicted some serious growth for the global voice recognition market. In its recently published report, “The Global Recognition Market 2012-2016,” analysts forecasted that the global market would grow at a CAGR of 22.07 percent through 2016. One of the biggest reasons for this predicted growth is the growing demand for voice biometrics, TMC (News - Alert) reported this week. The only factor that could actually negatively affect its growth would be its “inability to suppress ambient noises,” analysts added.

In other news, we bring you a marriage of gullable football star Manti Te’o and IVR technology. While it’s an unlikely pairing, it seems to signal to us an interesting observation about today’s alternate digital reality; one where athletes become infamous overnight after falling prey to an intricate cyber scam.

TMC reported on a recent Plum Voice blog explaining that although IVR is more structured for the purposes of credit card hotlines and various memberships, it still “represents the same basic concept: an online front that accomplishes one key purpose.” When you stop and think about it, this just goes to show just how separate one world is from another.

Wrapping up this week is news of Google (News - Alert) offering speech recognition in its Chrome Web browser, which lets users dictate e-mails in a Web-based mail solution. Even more, TMC reported this week, these kind of innovative voice commands are steadily working to shape 2013. While this space may in some forms still be in its infancy, it has made some very significant strides in recent years – especially for consumer purposes.

Regarding Google Chrome, Google engineer Glen Shires explained, “With the new Web Speech API, developers can make their Web pages recognize what you say.” Shires adds that users need only click on a microphone image and start speaking to begin the process, and that the JavaScript Web Speech API provides control and flexibility over speech recognition in Google Chrome Version 25 and later.

That’s going to do it this week for the latest news in the IVR space. To see what’s new next week, be sure to check back in same time, same place – only here at TMCnet.

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