Whether hitting it big time at HiMSS 2011, catering to worldwide gamers, or making your auto attendant an enterprise all-star, speech recognition technology is finding its place in your hospital, your office, your home, and many more places known and unknown. Those utilizing speech recognition technology in their services and solution report a significant return on their speech recognition investments.
According to KLAS, a research firm specializing in monitoring and reporting the performance of healthcare vendors, respondents say there are significant benefits of speech recognition, such as staff reductions and improved report turnaround times, among others. Such benefits also piqued the interest of healthcare providers attending HiMSS 2011. The healthcare conference and exhibition, held from Feb. 20 – 24, provides a platform to link people, potential and progress. Healthcare professionals discussed healthcare transformation through IT, including the role of such technologies as speech recognition and the benefits it provides to the healthcare industry in such solutions as auto attendants and EMRs.
Speech recognition, however, helps more than RNs and MDs, bringing smiles to children and gamers worldwide. With the introduction of the Kinect in November, Microsoft (News - Alert) faced a number of challenges accompanying its global release, such as catering to 12 languages. Time was at the forefront of these, as there were really only two years between the Kinect's early design and prototype phase and its global launch. In this brief period, the team was challenged with catering to 12 languages. Speech recognition technology can be found in the popular Kinect demo game, Kinectimals. In particular, this game supports voice commands and the Name Your Animal feature. Voice command is supported through a limited set of "grammars," which are sets of words or phrases that trigger an in-game response. Microsoft needed to have a wide range of age groups in the testing pool to ensure speech recognition worked for everyone.
Speech technology appears to keep the ER moving and home entertainment functioning, but what can it do for your enterprise? Are you considering a managed auto attendant service such as Parlance Corp’s nameConnector? The auto attendant service, utilizing speech recognition technology, is delivered via a hosted model and thus can be deployed rapidly for low up-front cost. However, unlike other auto attendant services which leave it up to the customer to maintain the system after it has been deployed, Parlance’s nameConnector service is fully managed 24-7, meaning each customer’s system and its speech recognition technology is continuously optimized for reliability and accuracy.
Jaclyn Allard is a TMCnet Web Editor. She most recently worked on the production team at Juran Institute, a quality consulting firm producing its own training and marketing materials. Previously, she interned at Curbstone Press, a nonprofit publishing press in Willimantic, CT, and fulfilled the role of Editor-in-Chief for the literature and arts journal published by the University of Connecticut. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Jaclyn Allard