Standardisation and Open Platforms to Boost Enterprise Deployments of Speech Technologies and Speech-enabled Solutions

Frost: - Speech capabilities are evolving from isolated, small-scale applications within business infrastructures to enterprise-wide deployments due to enhanced focus on standardisation and open platforms. At the same time, a variety of delivery models are being used to provide speech solutions. As a result, the telephony-based speech technology and solutions markets are exhibiting tremendous growth in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Overall market growth will be supported by the growing improvements of core speech technologies, the adoption of these technologies by leading telephony vendors, as well as the availability of partially packaged solutions that allow customisation. Speech technologies are also being deployed in embedded solutions such as speech-enabled mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) as well as handheld devices and are also likely to be used in different multimodal solutions.

In keeping with this trend, core technology vendors are expected to witness a surge in revenues from automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS) and speaker verification (SV) licenses. Currently, speech-enabled self-service solutions (such as interactive voice responses (IVRs) and enterprise voice portals), auto attendants, unified messaging, directory assistance and voice portals generate over 70.0 per cent of telephony-based speech technologies revenues.

Despite this, speech applications continue to have limited penetration among enhanced services due to factors such as high cost and lack of value-added speech-enabled consumer services.

Hence, vendors will gain by providing speech resources across self-service and enhanced service applications as this will help reduce the price premium of speech applications. The increasing adoption of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and Internet protocol (IP) telephony is likely to enable cost-efficient sharing of speech resources across multiple applications and will have a favourable impact on the deployment of speech technologies.

Due to the commoditisation of core technology products, vendors will need to diversify their product lines to tap into higher levels of the value chain, particularly the applications level. In view of the tiered competitive market structure, the increasing focus on specialisation and emphasis on specific product areas is likely to result in innovation, competitive pricing and greater support for open standards.

The consolidation of existing participants as well as the entry of new vendors and service providers is resulting in intensifying competition and the market is likely to witness increased investment in sales and marketing that will boost customer awareness. It will become imperative to seamlessly integrate and interface speech applications with existing systems and next-generation network (NGN) infrastructure to enable customers to maximise the value of their investments.

EMEA Telephony-based Speech Technologies and Solutions Markets

Publ 20060323