NLP, Particularly in Speech, Expected to Surge

The global natural language processing (NLP) market was valued at $10.9 billion in 2019 and is expected to be worth $34.8 billion by 2025, registering a compound annual growth rate of 21.5 percent, according to a report from Mordor Intelligence.

The report noted that in the past few years, deep learning architectures and algorithms have made impressive advances in the market landscape, which is being dominated by speech analytics solutions.

Speech analytics, it said, is gaining popularity among businesses across the world since conventional text-based analytics is no longer enough to handle complex business issues. Many organizations are deploying speech analytics through a combination of internally recorded data, social media data, and external syndicated data, mainly to have a better understanding of their customer requirements.

The report also noted that advancements in voice assistant technologies, such as Amazon's Alexa, are fueling the adoption of speech analytics. Among these advancements, it cites Chinese retailer Alibaba's recent release of a smart speaker system, Tmall Genie, which uses NLP and AliGenie voice assistant to receive customers' requests. Additionally, emerging companies, like Homebase, further developed new skills for voice assistants using NLP.

The report also maintains that customer engagement vendors are incorporating AI capabilities into their platforms, which is driving a significant portion of the market's growth.

Another key trend identified is the transition from existing legacy systems to software-as-a-service platforms, which the report says is still an expensive process involving technical and non-technical resources and other challenges, including a lack of understanding of cloud computing migration.

While North America is still the dominant market for such technologies, the report notes that the Asia-Pacific region is gaining strength quickly, thanks in large part to the fact that the voice assistant market is booming there. China and India in particular are seeing huge spikes in the usage of such technologies.