LBIT's Automatic Speech Recognition Solutions

Although the IT /ITES/BPO industry portrays a rosy picture in terms of business growth, the sector faces the highest attrition rate of over 40-50% every year. Only 25% of technical graduates and 10-15% general college graduates are suitable for employment in the offshore IT/ITES/BPO industry. Hence talent acquisition is a major concern area with the applicant to intake ration being 67:1 on an average.

According to Lattice Bridge Infotech (LBIT), the industry can address these key concerns using the Automatic Speech Recognition technology, that is, using LBIT’s voice portal, which will enable information access without human component using the Natural Language Understanding System.

Mohan Ram, MD, Lattice Bridge, said “Speech recognition empowers people to communicate with information systems. India is a country with 196.7 million telecom connections but 3 million broadband connections. Due to socio-economic, cultural, educational, financial and linguistic barriers almost 70-80% of the population will most probably not have access to the Internet. Speech recognition technology becomes the easiest, cost-effective, most highly scalable solution to disseminate information. Today our technology can deliver any digital content other than pictures or video on a normal landline or mobile phone.

LBIT’s fleet of solutions

LBIT has over forty ready to deploy speech/voice applications in logistics, transport and travel, BFSI, Telecom (VAS), and customer care. LBIT has the distinction of launching the world’s first ‘Tamil Speech Recogniser’ in the telephony environment and ‘first-ever large scale public deployment of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) application’ in India for Indian Railways. LBIT has implemented an ASR solution for customer care in a Telco in ten languages in India (covering almost 85% callers, who opt for vernacular as their preferred language).

LBIT has lined up a wide basket of voice-based solutions to meet the needs of the IT/ITES/BPO industry in streamlining processes, implementing efficient and cost effective HR practices to combat business and HR challenges and maintain their competitive edge.

Some of the product offered by LBIT include an Automated Call Centre that automates a whole range of offerings like providing service/tech support to customers; employee self service that allows you to conduct tele-interview by automatically administering screening test to potential candidates; speech biometrics that uses as many as 12 voice parameters and scores of other subtle metrics to identify you as a person; extended employee care (Webtra) that lets you track your fleet of vehicles and people through a voice- cum-SMS based system; and Voice logger that logs all voice transactions for report generation, voice mining and pattern matching for reference in case of any disputes.

Key Benefits of ASR

According to industry experts, Automated Speech Recognition is cost effective because automated customer service can reduce cost of operating by minimising human inefficiencies and reducing the time to recruit by a big margin. It’s an add-on to the existing network and there is no need for replacing the existing system. The security is strong and reportedly gives no entry point for hackers and an ASR system is safer than Internet-based applications. Upgradability is high as the latest cutting-edge technologies can be easily adapted to this system.

“One of the finest examples we can think of when it comes to benefits to our customers is that of us working with Tata-tele wherein we have provided speech recognition services for their Prepaid customers. The services helped the Tata tele people to serve a groundbreaking number of 1 million customers per day and for each customer in 11 different languages. These numbers could only be achieved with the help of a technology as advanced and sophisticated as speech technology," claims Ram.