Peter Ryan, analyst, Datamonitor

Q: What are the main transactional voice technologies available on the market right now?
A: There are four broad categories of transactional solutions that currently exist.  These include:

• Account management, which allows customers to use their own voice over a network to handle functions such as bill payment;
• Reservations, where customers wishing to book hotels or automobiles over the telephone use a voice interface, as opposed to waiting for an operator;
• Pay-as-you-go, which is growing due to the uptake in top-up cellular telephones around the world; and
• Order management, where customers use a voice portal to buy goods and services over the telephone, without speaking to a human agent.

Q: Which vertical markets have the longest legacy in voice-automated transactions?
A: The industries that have the longest history using these solutions are those that have been using speech the longest.  Obviously, these are financial services and telcos, which have been able to leverage transactional deployments into existing speech systems.

Q: Are there any verticals that are projected to adopt speech transactions aggressively over the coming five years?
A: Yes.  Datamonitor expects speech transactions to grow sharply in travel & tourism, retail and the public sector.  Note that these are all customer-facing industries that have begun to use voice solutions in areas such as call-steering.  As their confidence in the technology grows, so will their willingness to use speech transactions for commercial purposes.

Q: Does voice authentication play a role in speech transactions?
A: There is reason to believe that in the future, voice authentication can help accentuate the level of security associated with speech transactions.  The technology works very well, and has a solid legacy in the public sector.  However, the key challenges include how to harvest the literally millions of biometric voice prints to develop a consumer database and how best to store them.

Q: Regionally, is there a variance in the adoption of voice solutions?
A: Currently, North America and EMEA dominate the market in terms of uptake of these solutions.  However, there is likely to be significant growth in APAC over the next five years, due to continued innovation in Australia / New Zealand, economic recovery in Japan and increased telephony deployments in China.  In terms of CALA, while annual growth is expected to be rapid, the actual number of deployments will still be relatively small.