The partners of the SPEECH Community actively contribute to current topics and issues concerning voice business – e.g. whitepapers dealing with trends and solutions.

Here you will find a selection of relevant papers:

A BT and Nortel Whitepaper

Fragvergence describes two trends in the marketplace which are converging and fragmenting. As communication devices, networks and software converge in capability, consumer use of such technology is increasingly fragmented – in the channel chosen, the occasion of interaction and how the device is used. While some experts state that consumers will migrate to use one all powerful channel for all customer contact – eg the Internet with VOIP or a fully enabled mobile handset– research evidence suggests that fragmentation is the more likely future outlook.

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A BT Global Services Whitepaper

The agent is becoming increasingly central to the delivery of customer experience within the contact centre. However, with customers becoming more demanding and less satisfied with the contact centre experience, the agent often gets caught in the management of contradictions as they try to balance the demands of the organisation (increase efficiency) with the needs of the customer (get service).

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A BT Global Services Whitepaper

In today’s dynamic and evolving consumer marketplace, consumers are becoming active, vital participants in the corporate value chain. Today’s paradigm is not merely about “listening to consumers.” It’s about integrating consumers into your business model so that they actually take over some of business’ traditional functions. It involves co-opting consumers to create a part of the value they desire.

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A BT Global Services Whitepaper

Contact centres are facing a dilemma as they battle to reduce
operating costs whilst, simultaneously, increasing service levels to cater
for an increasingly demanding customer population. The biggest challenge for operations managers is to recruit and retain appropriately qualified but cost effective contact centre advisors.

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A BT Global Services Whitepaper

Customers today are changing more than the organisations that serve them. As customers gain access to more channels and increasingly sophisticated technologies, they are becoming armchair researchers, using multiple channels to get access to the best value propositions, information and advice. They naturally exploit the various strengths and weaknesses of the channels given to them. They are, however, technology agnostic – they interact with companies rather than channels and expect the web channel, contact centre and face-to-face channel to have an awareness of their actions regardless as to which channel they have used before.

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An Eckoh Whitepaper

Over the next five years the contact centre industry -its size,shape and the
services it provides -will change beyond recognition as the self service revolution redefines service possibilities and the role of the agent.One thing,however,will remain reassuringly unchanged;the telephone,which accounts for 80 percent of today's contact centre interactions -will retain its supremacy as the primary customer contact channel.Here Jim Hennigan,Executive Director of contact centre automation specialist,Eckoh,pinpoints the next technology developments that will revolutionise our use of the telephone and secure its role in the contact centre of the future.

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An Envox Whitepaper prepared by Opus Research

Contact centers increasingly rely on voice self-service solutions to automate customer service inquiries without compromising caller satisfaction. That's because voice self-service solutions are designed to provide better customer service by shortening wait times and providing callers with 24x7 access to their accounts. Plus, they help customer service organizations lower contact center costs by reducing the need for customer service agents.

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An Envox Whitepaper prepared by Opus Research

Today’s voice self-service solutions are complex systems, in that they combine hardware and software components which are integrated with call processing, database processing other systems in the IT infrastructure, most commonly customer relationship management (CRM), order processing, billing, and scheduling applications. Needless to say, no two systems are exactly alike. This document serves as a guide through the process of drafting a RFP to solicit bids from vendors of premises-based, voice self-service platforms.

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An Envox Whitepaper

Interactive voice response (IVR) is a powerful tool for improving phone-based communications. The technology bridges telephony and data systems to automatically answer questions, collect and store information, process transactions and intelligently route calls. Organizations across the globe have employed Envox IVR solutions to improve customer service operations, delight callers, reduce expenses and create new revenue opportunities. This whitepaper will provide you with examples by industry of how IVR is being used to make a difference in each of these areas.

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An Envox Whitepaper

Computer telephony integration (CTI) technology, which synchronizes and blends telephone and computer interactions, has been around since the 1970s. While CTI offers a business many different benefits, the major users of CTI technology are call centers that utilize CTI to reduce call handling time and improve their efficiency. Advances such as VoIP and standard software interfaces, such as SIP and Web services, for both PBXs and enterprise applications have made CI more affordable and more practical than ever before. Now even a contact center with fewer than twenty agents can realize the benefits of a CTI application. This whitepaper will explain the benefits of CTI and how to quantify the savings in your contact center.

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An Envox Whitepaper prepared by Datamonitor

Open standards technology is changing the interactive voice response (IVR) landscape. For over 20 years, proprietary IVR systems were the 'tried and true' phone-based automation, routing and service enablement application and accounted for the vast majority of IVR deployments in the market. But in recent years, as business needs have outgrown the constraints of rigid, legacy TDM-based telephony architectures - the native environments for traditional IVR systems - organizations have begun to move to more flexible Web services deployment models that favor open standards-based platforms. Today, organizations are replacing traditional IVR systems with next generation IVR platforms based on open standards technology to complement their migration to a Web-centric architecture in addition to leveraging the many benefits that these platforms offer.

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An Envox whitepaper

The increase in VoIP technology adoption is having an interesting impact on hosted IVR and contact center solutions and their providers. Like their enterprise counterparts, hosted service providers are adopting VoIP quickly, and there are more hosted IP-based services than ever before. This is good news for enterprises because hosted IVR and contact center services provide a number of advantages over on-premise solutions, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.

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An Envox whitepaper

Self-service solutions improve satisfaction ratings by providing customers with instant access to information and services. When self-service solutions are used in conjunction with live agent services, they reduce hold times, help balance call loads and reserve agents for callers that need extra attention. Adding speech is a proven method for improving self-service solutions by heightening caller satisfaction, increasing automation rates and lowering overall call time.

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An Envox whitepaper

It’s apparent to most anyone who calls toll-free numbers today that speech recognition is becoming a mainstream feature of interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Clearly, this technology works and is paying off for many companies and government organisations. But like any technology, speech recognition may not be a good choice in all circumstances. What are its benefits, and just as importantly, its limitations? How can you come up with hard numbers that quantify its potential value for your organisation?

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An Envox whitepaper

Even though cost is a powerful and legitimate motivator for switching to VoIP, these conversions also open up broad possibilities in customer service and contact center efficiency that will ultimately surpass economy as their primary benefit. VoIP enables companies to implement service improvements that have been technically possible but economically unrealistic until recently. The Internet as a voice infrastructure replaces expensive and inflexible leased lines with a low-cost, ubiquitous infrastructure.

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A RightNow Technologies and Genesys Whitepaper

A differentiated customer experience is critical for business success. Companies that consistently deliver positive customer experiences across all touchpoints maintain customer loyalty, build stronger brands, and are better able to avoid competition on price alone. They therefore grow faster and earn healthier profits than companies that don’t keep their customers happy. Download this whitepaper and learn 4 key service factors that drive customer loyalty, 7 technical service capabilities required to deliver an effectively differentiated experiences, and a practical approach on how to get there.

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A Genesys Whitepaper

As a primary touch point for customers, it’s imperative that the contact center take on a strategic role in order for a business to succeed. Executives across the organization
should recognize that now is the time to re-examine existing interactive voice response (IVR) systems, and discover how the customer experience can be transformed by moving to an intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD) - a solution that revolutionizes the experience of entering a company’s “virtual front door.”

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A Genesys Whitepaper

AT&T had 22 contact centers handling up to 500,000 calls per day. This volume - and the disparate nature of its center operations - made it difficult to understand and correlate the data necessary to determine whether performance and customer service levels were satisfactory. Download a new industry case study and learn how AT&T implemented a Genesys Informiam Product Line solution to handle increasing numbers of calls and meet service level goals—resulting in:
• A cumulative net benefit of $6.4 million
• Annual ROI of 201% and payback in 10 months
• Problem recognition in 20 to 60 seconds versus 30 to 45 minutes

A Genesys Whitepaper

What is the Customer Front Door, and why is it important? For most customers the first impression is formed when they come through the front door of your business – and in many cases the “front door” is a Web site, an e-mail, a text message (SMS), or a phone call to a call centre. But the impression it makes on the customer is as lasting as ever. In this whitepaper, Genesys looks at the state of customer service today, how technologies such as voice self-service can help (or hurt) relationships, and how some companies have successfully blended automation and personalised service.

A Genesys Whitepaper

What is the Customer Front Door, and why is it important? We all know that first impressions are lasting ones. For most customers that impression is formed when they come through the front door of your business – and in today’s world there isn’t always a physical front door for them to walk through.

A Genesys Whitepaper

The VoiceGenie Platform enables Contact Centers, Enterprises and Service Providers to quickly and easily deliver integrated speech or touch-tone applications to automate customer and employee self-service transactions. The VoiceGenie Platform leverages standards such as VoiceXML, CCXML, MRCP and SIP for the development and deployment of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Next- Generation Applications within contact centers and service provider networks.

A Genesys Whitepaper

Genesys Voice Platform is a software product that delivers next generation voice processing to meet sophisticated call routing and voice self-service needs. Voice Platform improves the value proposition of traditional IVR systems with lowered costs and improved time to market for speech-directed voice applications, a standards-based VoiceXML development environment, more personalized and dynamic customer interactions, and an integrated approach to self-service, intelligent routing and agent-assisted service. Voice Platform enables phone access to web-based content, facilitates consistent communications between voice and web support channels, eliminates redundant expenditures in disparate infra-structures, and delivers operational cost savings over pro-prietary IVR solutions.

A Genesys Whitepaper

In a nutshell, self-service happens when customers directly communicate with a company’s systems without any interaction with employees.
The Industry Insider Guide shows, how Customer Self Service works with Speech Technology.

A Genesys Whitepaper

Genesys has written this series of guides to address the various phases of selecting, implementing and managing a voice self-service solution.Volume 1 outlines specific considerations to prepare for a voice self-service solution and to ensure that enterprises achieve their desired goals.

A Genesys Whitepaper

From a process perspective, enterprises must carefully assess and define the best method to educate other lines of business about the value of the corporate voice platform. To leverage the benefits of and propagate voice self-service throughout the organization, an internal “evangelist” with strong business acumen needs to publicize the success of the initial deployment and application. In terms of technology and people, the enterprise must have plans about how they will perform the ongoing operations and maintenance of the voice platform and have the necessary internal developers well trained on VXML for new application development requests. The end result is a set of best practices that will ensure your organization has the tools necessary to successfully select, deploy, and manage a voice self-service platform.

A Nuance Whitepaper

In this white paper, Nuance examines a problem facing an increasing number of enterprises and institutions as they try to enhance user services over the phone. In an age when privacy and security are growing concerns, how can you assure that your callers are who they claim to be?

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A Nuance Whitepaper

With over 300 customers using its voice biometrics technology, Nuance is uniquely positioned to advise businesses how to effectively plan and deploy a voice verification solution. This paper addresses some of the key topics and makes high level recommendations around best practice in voice biometrics.

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A Nuance Whitepaper

Nuance Verifier 4.0, Nuance’s advanced voice authentication software, enables businesses to provide secure access to sensitive information over the telephone. Like a fingerprint, Nuance Verifier voice authentication software creates individual voiceprints to authenticate callers and customers with just their voices, enabling secure access to information. Read the following two exclusive whitepapers about the Nuance Verifier and frequently asked questions.

	Nuance Verifier 4.0: Voice Authentication Software for Secure Access over the Telephone
	Nuance Verifier: Frequently asked questions

A Nuance Whitepaper

Financial institutions and others are seeking to improve security for financial solutions over electronic channels in order to provide superior customer service and reduce their reputational and regulatory risk. Speaker verification and speech recognition solutions support a highly secure, cost effective approach to customer authentication over the voice channel. Nuance’s proven approach to supporting two-factor authentication using speech biometrics and recognition provides highly secure access to sensitive information while presenting a low user burden.

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A Nuance Whitepaper

This paper addresses the topics and areas of uncertainty that are most common for organizations beginning to consider voice biometrics as a security option for their business. The goal is to inform, to provide insight as to the possibilities of voice biometrics, and to help decision-makers answer initial questions. This paper does not provide an in-depth view of the Nuance Verifier technology, as that is available via other collateral on the Nuance web site at www.nuance.com. The topics discussed in this paper include use cases, common questions, important terms and concepts, and key considerations.

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A Nuance Whitepaper

Voice authentication offers a world without PINs with even greater security. Access to payroll, 401K, medical, banking, frequent flier, insurance, and a host of other accounts and services can be made easier and more secure with voice authentication. Voice authentication also enables companies to personalise their services, creating opportunities for increased revenue through one-to-one marketing. In addition to providing security and personalisation for over the phone services, voice authentication can also be used to secure access to facilities and sensitive computer data. The purpose of this document is to provide answers to questions frequently asked by partners and customer, regarding the technology and its applications.

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A Nuance Whitepaper

Technology and the emergence of social computing and media has changed business and communication, but it´s also empowered consumers to give them more control and higher expectations of customer service. What it requires from companies is a shift from the Care 1.0 world, which tended to gauge customer interaction in terms of containment, to a Care 2.0 era, where the consumer is free to drive the interaction and ultimately get what he or she needs when and how they want it. The “when and how” is increasingly important as consumers can communicate in more ways and from more places than ever before. But the telephone stays the top-option for consumers to contact companies – with speech systems providing great chances for the companies to automate and leverage their customer service.

A Nuance Whitepaper

We have all experienced the Care 1.0 world, where companies wield the power in the relationship with the customer. Technology, however, is accelerating change in the world of customer care and is shifting power to the customer. The concept of anywhere, anytime is being taken to a whole new level, bringing today´s customer to feel entitled to great service. The shift in power from businesses to consumers necessitates a change in the way companies approach care and respond to customers: the transition from Care 1.0 to Care 2.0!

A Nuance Whitepaper

In this whitepaper,Nuance shares the results of a recent Harris Interactive poll that explored consumer attitudes toward customer service and asked consumers: What constitutes a positive customer experience? What customer interaction channels do consumers prefer? When are consumers willing to use automated customer self service? What type of automation do consumers prefer over the phone? Today’s consumers are more savvy,more knowledgeable, and have louder voices than ever before.Companies interested in gaining market share, building their brand, and reducing churn would be well advised to listen to what these consumers are saying.

A Nuance Whitepaper

The most successful technology investments are those that result from sound business strategy that prioritizes corporate objectives and takes into account a clear vision for the company in the years ahead. The same rules apply when it comes to making technology investments: up-front strategy development can make all the difference. That’s why Nuance encourages companies with multiple business units or call centers to approach their evaluation of automation technologies by first defining a business performance in the short term and voice strategy — a company-wide road map for achieving desired over the next three to four years.

A Nuance Whitepaper

In the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a computer called HAL 9000 converses with the astronauts on board the space ship. Well, computers aren’t yet (!) intelligent enough to engage in lengthy, rambling conversations, but voice or speech recognition software is now sufficiently sophisticated to support human telephone operators for customer service calls and has been adopted by major companies, ranging from banks to airlines to telecoms companies.

A Nuance Whitepaper

Nuance established the industry’s first professional services team which has designed and deployed thousands of speech systems across 35 industries using a proven methodology for client engagements that delivers repeatable results. We've raised the industry benchmark for next-generation conversational applications, receiving multiple awards year after year for our ground breaking deployments. It’s no wonder that Nuance Professional Services is the trusted advisor for leading businesses looking to deploy state-of-the-art speech applications.

A Nuance Whitepaper

Providing an outstanding customer experience can lead to increased profitability and can create greater customer loyalty. A crucial factor in creating a positive customer experience is consistency, which means providing the same level of care and attention to detail at every touch point. Although many companies have committed to massive investment in media such as the Web, email, and live chat, the lion’s share of customer interaction still begins on the telephone—and it’s there that the customer experience often falls short. Luckily, today’s technology has finally caught up to the telephone. That technology, coupled with an understanding of what customers need and want, makes creating a positive customer experience more attainable than ever.

A Nuance Whitepaper, July 2007

In today’s competitive business environment, customer care is a highly effective means of achieving differentiation and winning customer loyalty. As a result,speech applications are playing an increasingly pivotal role in defining the customer care experience. Companies are investing in speech-based self-service solutions to meet growing demand for convenient 24x7 access to information, transactions, and customer service. The most successful of these speech solutions balance automation with usability to deliver self-service interactions designed and managed from the customer’s point of view. Relying heavily on speech recognition,these solutions enable more efficient phone-based interactions that result in improved customer satisfaction and significant cost savings. This paper details a voice recognition solution that provides increased accuracy, reliability and ease of use: the Nuance Recognizer.

A Nuance Whitepaper

Nuance established the industry’s first professional services team in 1994. Since that time, Nuance Professional Services has designed and deployed over three thousand speech systems across dozens of industries, amassing the most complete skills, expertise, and best practices knowledge in the world. This knowledge has allowed us to create Nuance’s Global Engagement Methodology, or GEM, a proven client engagement process that delivers repeatable, and exceptional, results. Subsequently, we’ve raised the industry benchmark for cutting-edge conversational applications, receiving multiple awards year after year for our groundbreaking deployments. Our project delivery staff is organized around four global disciplines that are all critical to the successful development of a speech application: Voice User Interface Design, Speech Science, Speech Application Architecture & Development and Project Management.

A Nuance Whitepaper

In today’s competitive business environment, customer care is a highly effective means of achieving differentiation and winning customer loyalty. As a result, speech applications are playing an increasingly pivotal role in defining the customer care experience. Companies are investing in speech-based selfservice solutions to meet growing demand for convenient 24x7 access to information, transactions,and customer service. The most successful of these speech solutions balance automation with usability to deliver self-service interactions designed and managed from the customer’s point of view. Relying heavily on speech recognition, these solutions enable more efficient phone-based interactions that result in improved customer satisfaction and significant cost savings.

A Nuance Whitepaper

In a world where customers do only a fraction of their business in person at the local bank branch, the importance of reliably establishing their identity over electronic channels can’t be overstated. In this white paper will be discussed:
• What is entailed in supporting the FFIEC guidance
• The importance of multi-channel security in modern banking environments
• Weaknesses in currently deployed authentication methods over the telephone
• How speaker verification and speech recognition technologies meet the FFIEC guidance for two-factor authentication in a reliable, cost-effective and flexible way
• Best practices in implementation, design and consumer education for speaker verification solutions
• Third party endorsement of the viability of the speech technology solutions for user authentication in a commercial application

A Nuance Whitepaper

In a marketplace that is constantly evolving and becoming more competitive than ever, shrewd business leaders are seeking an edge that can help them maximize profits, create growth, and carve out a distinct niche. They’re also looking for ways to sustain long-term value that don’t include transitory trends or the latest corporate fad. It’s a tall order, but the solution is surprisingly simple: improve the customer experience. Understanding the five essential facts can help you implement a successful telephone strategy as part of your commitment to customer care.

A Nuance Whitepaper

In this white paper, Nuance examines a problem facing an increasing number of enterprises and institutions as they try to enhance user services over the phone. In an age when privacy and security are growing concerns, how can you assure that your callers are who they claim to be? We will discuss knowledge-based, challenge and response authentication, and the judicious use of out-of-band controls to reach a reasonable level of certainty that your callers are indeed who they claim to be.

A Nuance Whitepaper

How companies communicate with their customers—in ohter words, how they manage their business-customer interface—is an increasingly key differentiator in all industries. As offerings become commoditized, how you converse with your customers is approaching the importance of what you speak with them about. More and more companies who are passionate about their customer service recognize this fact, and understand the customer benefits that conversational applications deliver to the business-customer interface. Successful conversational applications are cost effective and compelling solutions to handling call centre services efficiently, and to delivering superior, differentiated customer service. A growing number of businesses leverage their telephone services as rich veins of brand reinforcement, deploying high quality conversational applications that strengthen corporate identity and messaging while providing exceptionally high levels of customer service. This Whitepaper explains how to Improve customer service, save money, strengthen your brand, and enhance customer perceptions of your business with each and every call!

A Nuance Whitepaper

xHMI is an XML-based dialog configuration language that enables the development of powerful speech applications. It facilitates interoperability between speech applications, components, tools, and application platforms from different vendors. It is highly flexible, so in addition to supporting today’s standard application types, it enables the more powerful conversational applications the market demands. At the same time, it allows applications to be developed with a shorter time-to-market and lower development, maintenance, and support costs.

A Nuance Whitepaper

The aim of this white paper is to assist the reader in understanding how to carry out an effective evaluation and how to interpret evaluation results. The tests are applicable to both con-catenative systems (i.e., systems that select and join together segments of real speech from a database to read out a text, like RealSpeak™ Telecom and RealSpeak Solo) and formant systems (i.e., systems that synthesize the speech signal from scratch, like SpeechWorks Solutions’ ETI-Eloquence™).

A Nuance Whitepaper

This document contains the technical description of the development of a Custom Voice for the Real S peak ™ Text-To-Speech (TTS) 4.x engine. Custom Voices are available for the network and the embedded product line of Real Speak ™.
This document has been created by the Text-To-Speech Department of Nuance to:
- Describe the scope of the customized Text-To-Speech Systems
- Describe the custom voice development process
- Give an overview of the project time frame
- Define roles and responsibilities between the different parties involved

A Nuance Whitepaper

OpenSpeech DialogModules™ (OSDMs) from Nuance are highly configurable application building blocks for the development of speech applications. Developers use OSDMs to streamline the development process and accelerate time-to-market of applications that deliver a consistent user interface for speech-enabled VoiceXML content. OSDMs, based on patented technology from Nuance, consist of the packaged grammars and proven call flow components necessary for building and deploying effective speech services. They provide extensive support for dialog logging, including sequential grouping of activities within a single call, to provide detailed information that can be used for analysis, tuning, and reporting purposes.

An Auraya Solutions Whitepaper

In this whitepaper, Auraya describes the application of its speaker adaptive voice authentication technology to provide a solution to this problem. The solution allows the contact centre agent to take a call and using the speech provided by the caller during the conversation compare their voice in the background against a “black-list” of known fraudsters and suspicious callers to see if the voice matches. Where there is a close match the agent or call centre manager can be notified and appropriate action taken.

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Whitepaper prepared by Björn Austraat

The movie “Slumdog Millionaire” contains a poignant scene in which the main character attempts to convince a Scottish caller that he is physically located in a call center right down the road from her rather than in Mumbai, thousands of miles away. Beyond meeting such surface challenges of intercultural communication, effective call center offshoring to India also needs to consider the country’s dynamic macroeconomic, demographic, and technological environments and strive to find an optimal combination of technology, onshore, and offshore resources. This paper will describe one possible approach to geographically blended call distribution based on customer segments using intelligent call routing through natural-language speech recognition.

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A PELORUS Group Whitepaper sponsored by VPI

You don’t have to have a big contact center to perform like one. The person on the other end of the line does not know if your contact center has 10 agents or 1000. They expect top quality service. By providing not just good but memorable customer service you can make your business stand out from the crowd. If you are just starting out, don’t expect to become a best-in-class contact center overnight. You will learn from experience and make necessary adjustments. You can also learn by becoming involved in one of the many associations of contact center professionals and by attending industry events to meet experts and peers. Many of the practices this whitepaper describes require little or no additional investment. However, deployment of superior interaction recording and related performance management tools such as Interaction Voice Recognition can make the job a lot easier.

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A Pronexus Whitepaper

If you build IVRs for call centers, hosting multiple applications or for mission critical applications — or want to target these markets — the Pronexus’ Modularity feature set can help you succeed. The Modularity feature set enables VBVoice developers to distribute or “break apart” their application into separate yet cooperating processes under what we have termed a master / slave architecture.

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