The Possibilities of Change: How to Find the Right Speech to Text Solution

In a previous blog, Kevin covered some considerations that should go into the decision to purchase an STT or ASR solution. If you’ve already got an STT solution in place, however, your needs are quite different.

You may be satisfied with your existing STT solution. Or you may be resigned to dealing with it. Whatever the case, there are always alternatives out there, and there may be something better — even if you like what you’ve got.

In order to make the right decision for your business, here are some questions to keep in mind if you already have an STT solution in place.

First, what is your enterprise speech analytics strategy? You may have a well-developed strategy, or you may not have considered this at all. Whichever is the case, you should have a clear sense of what speech analytics is for and how it is supposed to deliver value to your enterprise.

You already have an STT solution, and changing to one that doesn’t help advance your strategy — or, worse, makes it harder to achieve — clearly doesn’t make sense. The only way to avoid that is to know, before you talk to vendors, what your strategy is.

Digging into this a little deeper, you should also consider how many use-cases will be involved in the deployment, as well as how many departments within your business. If you need to get buy-in from across the enterprise, then you should start when you’re still in the planning and research stages.

Additionally, if there are organizational needs that aren’t being met by the current solution, that’s incredibly important to know, as you can go and look for new solutions which specifically serve those functions. By the same token, if there are needs that the current solution is meeting, and are critical to the business, then you need to ensure a new solution won’t get in the way.

As you probably know, there are a lot of features that STT solutions can deliver. Maybe your current solution is delivering everything you need — but maybe it isn’t. And maybe there are features that other STT solutions have which you didn’t even know were possible.

For example, do you have a business need to identify the gender of callers? What about sentiment and emotion? If these are important features to identify, and your current STT solution can’t deliver them (or can’t deliver them well), then it’s clearly time for a change!

Voice biometrics is another feature that an STT solution can deliver. For compliance purposes, your business may need to be able to use either active or passive biometric identification in order to protect customer security and privacy. If you need this, then that has to be a key feature for any STT solution that you’re moving to.

Looking at the big picture, an STT solution has to be able to serve your business needs not just today, but well into the future. So, you should be developing your STT and speech analytics strategy with an eye to the future — 12 months, 24 months, or even three years down the road. How is your use of speech analytics going to evolve over time? If your current STT solution can’t keep up, it’s time for a change to a system that can.

For now, your STT solution might be good enough. It’s important to consider every factor that contributes to TCO, however. As technology ages, and as your business grows, your STT solution provider may no longer align with your needs. If you’re in that situation, or you can see it on the horizon, it’s probably time to take the above criteria into account, and look at what else is out there.