CHENNAI: In the world of technology, it is hardly weird behaviour to talk to a machine.

On the contrary, millions across the world are picking up their phones to ask an automated speech recognition system about virtually anything, from their current bank balance to the weather conditions in the Bahamas.

Chennai-based Lattice Bridge Infotech (LBIT), one of the frontrunners in the country in developing Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) applications, believes that the human voice has the potential to be the prime driver of a host of day-to-day information solutions in India.

The company plans to market its technology that adopts speech as primary user interface to overseas markets, the company's managing director Mohan Ram said on Monday.

Many advantages

Apart from the obvious hands-free advantage — unlike the DTMF mode that involved punching digits in response to prompts — ASR platforms have proven to cut costs of companies and speeded up services for customers.

And, in India where huge proportions of the population cannot read or write, speech could be the most accessible technology platform to deliver a range of services, he said. The key is to develop solutions in local languages, he said.

The company cited two examples to showcase the scalability and cost-effective aspects of the ASR platform, where an Indian telecom company adopted the technology to handle one million calls a day in ten Indian languages, while an overseas firm invested Rs.1 crore on an automated system to respond to roughly 6,000 calls a day (ISD code enquiries) and started getting returns after 70 days through cost reduction.

LBIT's clientele includes Railways, BSNL and State Bank of India in India, Etihad Airways and Etisalat in the UAE.

It shares a strategic partnership with TeNeT, an R&D wing of IIT Madras, in developing solutions.

According to S. S. Rajan, strategy officer, it is the uniqueness of voice print that has allowed technology to adopt speech as one of the key parameters in user authentication. Here, the ASR system maps a customer's uttered password for parameters including concatenation, pacing, pitch and tone. The security emerged foolproof when it was tested for vulnerability to hacking.

S. Hari, chief-Technology and Operations, said the investment a company required for an ASR system for its customer information services depended on the density of traffic as well as the peak and lean loads.

The number of calls that could be handled simultaneously is directly proportional to the number of ports available.

Some companies can be fastidious about the voice they want on their automated tellers. One Indian company analysed 12,000 voice samples in various Indian languages before it put together an acoustic model.

Use in transactions

Apart from information provision or contact management, ASR applications can also be used for transactions such as order placement or ticket reservations.

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