More than 35 million people living in the United States speak Spanish as their primary language, requiring Spanish language contact center solutions to continue to evolve and progress. Yap (News - Alert), a leading provider of fully automated speech recognition services, has partnered with MetroPCS to launch a Spanish language voicemail-to-text service.

MetroPCS allows users to read their voicemail messages. The service is using Yap’s language identification technology to automatically determine whether a voicemail was spoken in English or Spanish, and then transcribes it into the corresponding language.

MetroPCS originally launched its U.S. English language voicemail-to-text service in April of last year using Yap. The new service automatically detects what language the voicemail was spoken in, allowing users to enjoy the service with a Spanish language option.

“Spanish language support is a natural evolution for Yap,” says Marcello Typrin, vice president of products at Yap, in a release. “There is a tremendous market opportunity for transcribing Spanish voicemails into text, and Yap’s platform provides the necessary high accuracy and fast turn-around time.”

Voicemail-to-text transcription offers many advantages over traditional voicemail services. Reading a voicemail message is much faster than listening to it. Transcriptions can be viewed in situations, such as meetings, where listening to voice messages is not practical. By having the contents of voicemails transcribed into text, there is no need to search for pen and paper to write down message details.

Voice Mail to Text is available to all of MetroPCS’s 8.9 million customers and is offered at no cost for select plans.

In related news, according to a white paper titled “Service, Por Favor: Ten Reasons to Better Serve and Woo the Booming Hispanic Market,” the Hispanic market segment boasts some $580 billion in spending power, which at the time was expected to nearly double to $925 billion by 2007. This means to businesses that they must pay more time and attention to your Spanish language contact center solution options.