Industry Report Paints a Rosy Picture for Speech

This week, Global Industry Analysts (GIA) predicted that after two years of dormancy, the speech industry will grow to a booming $20.9 billion by 2015.

In its report on the speech technology industry, GIA cites speech techology’s medium- to long-term benefits, even in the face of the recession, as one of the prime indicators for growth. The research firm  adds that not only has speech recognition become an invaluable part of “new-age” applications, but also states that the technology has gone beyond traditional corporate use, such as interactive voice response systems in contact centers and medical reporting in healthcare, to reach into the mass market. Now speech technology is of growing importance, especially in mobile phones, car navigation, and mobile search.

The use of simple natural speech commands has and will gain more significance, the firm predicts, especially as more and more mobile phone manufacturers offer handsets with voice recognition features built in. Some of these features include voice-dialing, speech-enabled GPS navigation, dictation, and voice search.

GIA also says global demand for automatic speech recognition is expected to increase at a robust double-digit growth rate through 2015 as a result of the opportunies for speech technology in the mobile market.

The United States and Europe account for most of the global speech technology market, GIA asserts, and while the industry will not grow quite as fast as it ha before the recession hit, call centers will continue to use speech solutions—speech only or combinations of speech and touch tone—will be responsible for much of the momentum.

Revenue for text-to-speech systems in United States is expected to surge at 23.2 percent per year through 2015. Additionally, the recession has spurred the popularity of new forms of e-commerce: voice commerce where companies seek to leverage the low-cost natural interface offered by automated speech recognition, text-to-speech, and voice-identification technologies to electronic channels of commerce.