Industry Dashboard: Datamonitor

This is the first of several studies that Datamonitor will be contributing to Speech Technology Magazine in 2006. These studies, called the Industry Dashboard series, provide insight into the uptake of speech recognition technology across various market segments in the industry.

As industry analysts, it is prudent that we constantly track customer wins in order to align our information with the latest trajectory of the industry, identify new trends and provide accurate uptodate market sizing data. For the past few years, the Datamonitor Voice Business research team has utilized much of the information from Speech Technology Magazine in conjunction with primary and secondary research to accurately segment and size the global speech recognition market. With the help of the Speech Technology Magazine staff, Datamonitor has aggregated most of the publicly announced customer wins for embedded, PC- and network-based speech recognition solutions. Our team has spliced, diced and analyzed this data to provide readers with a simple dashboard tool to help them gauge and understand the speech market.

As the first in the Industry Dashboard series, the information provided in this dashboard will be the baseline for subsequent bimonthly benchmark studies in 2006. As shown in the "Highlights" section of the dashboard, network-based speech recognition accounted for the largest proportion of publicly announced customer wins in 2005, and this market remains the largest opportunity for speech solutions according to Datamonitor research. Also highlighted are the three largest vertical markets for speech: communications, public sector and technology. There has been much activity in the network space of the communications vertical in the past year as service providers have made larger investments in voice portal applications. There has also been an uptake in speech in the public sector driven primarily by demand for network-based customer care services and PC speech solutions for educational institutions. And finally, the technology vertical has also exhibited a strong uptake across network-based customer care services, embedded speech among handset manufacturers and PC speech solutions among software companies. Surprisingly, the financial services vertical, the largest network-based enterprise market for speech, only accounted for 10.7 percent of publicly announced customer wins. This is primarily due to the sensitivity of customer care strategies among financial institutions. The baseline has been set at 160 publicly announced customer wins in 2005 and Datamonitor expects that this number will rise significantly by the end of 2006.