Communications Coming Full circle
Are we moving back into a Voice-First World?
With the wave of personal assistants, such as Siri, Cortana and
Google Assistant, and new startups leveraging AI and analytics to
build personal companions, it’s becoming clear we are moving
toward a new voice-controlled relationship with technology. As
we have already seen in the consumer market, it is all but a given
that these voice-activation systems will eventually make it into the
enterprise environment, as the potential benets of these systems
could be tremendous in simplifying and automating activities.
Pierre Samson, Vice President of Sales, APAC, at Alcatel-Lucent
Enterprise, explains that although it may be a long time before we
see the full likenesses of “HAL” from “2001: A Space Odyssey”,
the technology is already here that can improve the ways
businesses operate.
Lights, camera, action!
Think how much easier it would be for a physician to just say
“System: update Mary Smith’s chart with the following: “Patient
experiencing abdominal pain, issue pharmacy order for 200MG of
‘SuperAntiGas’, signed Dr. FeelBetter.” Or in a conference room,
instead of the struggle to gure out which remote control puts on
the projector and the screen, a simple voice request “System: turn
on projector, turn on TV and dim lights.”
The challenges
So, where are we on the road to voice-rst? Voice analytics rm,
VoiceLabs, has provided a view on the various layers needed to
support a voice-rst approach in the consumer world. However, to
move from the simple consumer-based use cases to providing a
more voice-rst environment in the enterprise world, a few things
will need to happen.
Security will be critical if we are to start having our enterprise
systems relying on voice commands – should anyone be able to
command critical equipment or systems just by speaking? The
answer, clearly, is no. Privacy too is a top concern, and while the
physician example above seems simple enough, we need to think
about this in context of regulations. Are a patient’s rights – as per
HIPAA regulations in the US – violated if these verbal commands
expose the patient’s medical information to third parties?Secure access
We are already seeing the next step of voice recognition systems
where the technology is able to support secure access.
Banks are among those introducing voice authentication to their
telephone banking systems. While this may leave some customers
a little concerned over the security of their account, my feeling is
that it will follow the adoption cycle we saw in e-Commerce
where the initial concerns for credit card fraud needed to be
overcome before we saw the meteoric rise in online purchasing.
We will continue to see continued innovation in voice recognition
systems and improvements that will enable voice system security
to be viable in an enterprise environment and ensure that only
authorized users with the right privileges can perform the
associated actions.And whereas your microwave might not be spying on you, some
devices will be always-on, always listening and potentially
recording. A few well publicized cases of privacy invasion,
commercial espionage or legal jeopardy could stall adoption. This
suggests that a big On/Off switch or function needs to be
included in voice-rst products, so that users may get the benets
without risking the downsides of constant monitoring. A reliably
secure software access would also need to be in place in the
products to prevent and detect hacking efforts.Building even more effective voice recognition
systemsThe rst use cases are primarily around voice response systems –
whether from a call center perspective or those implemented in
our cars and smartphones. But as many of us know from rsthand
experience, this works marginally at best. Recognition and
contextualization need to be rened through technological
developments before we can realistically think about enterprise-
wide adoption.Research programs such as Carnegie-Mellon University’s Sphinx
project continue to enhance language recognition capabilities. An
Internet Trends report by Mary Meeker indicated that in 2016,
Google’s voice recognition system could recognize over ve
million words with around 90 per cent accuracy – but that’s still
not extensive or accurate enough. Is 90 per cent accuracy good
enough to interact with a life support system in a hospital or a
utility provider’s network?FEATURE