Marchex’s AI-Powered Speech Analytics Approaches Human Levels of Accuracy in Consumer to Business Conversations

Marchex, a provider of call analytics, announced that is has reached a new industry standard in automatic transcription accuracy for consumer-to-business phone conversations, driven by enhancements to and investments in its proprietary speech analytics solution.

Marchex’s speech recognition functionality was put to an independently verified test against several other commercially-available solutions, based on a series of factors to directly compare capabilities. Using the same sample audio data from the business conversation domain, the test measured the word error rate (WER) which tracks the number of words that are inserted, deleted, or substituted in order to discern overall accuracy of a transcription. The internal evaluation, which was verified by enterprise technology analyst Frank Ohlhorst, found that:

• Marchex achieved an overall WER of 8.4 percent, which is a 20% improvement since 2017, and considerably better compared to other voice recognition systems.
• Marchex’s speech analytics solution performed 38 percent more accurately than IBM Watson, 37% more accurately than Azure Cognitive Service API, 13% more accurately than Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API and more than 11% more accurately than Amazon Transcribe API.
• Marchex speech analytics technology is nearing parity to human accuracy, which is roughly a 5% WER.

For industries with a significant reliance on phone calls to drive sales, such as the automotive, travel, and home services industries, AI-powered conversation analytics technology is critical to delivering sales enhancing personalized solutions. Accuracy plays a significant role in being able to automatically pinpoint the reason why a customer is calling, the outcome of the conversation, and the ability to classify calls in real-time.

Marchex invested in several key enhancements to its speech analytics technology, including additional deep learning capabilities, which have expanded both the accuracy and capacity of consumer-to-business conversation analysis. In addition, Marchex has invested heavily in internal resources, including the launch of the Marchex Innovation Development (MIND) Lab and the addition of several new data scientists. These investments represent Marchex’s ongoing dedication to lead and innovate within the speech analytics sector.

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