Moneycab: Mr. Popov, Spitch is a Swiss company specializing in speech technologies. What is your vision, and how far are you in the realization of this vision?
Our vision is to respond effectively to a new reality of communications by providing our clients with customized speech analytics, voice biometrics, and semantic interpretation solutions. Our key differentiators are easy access and fast deployment, as well as the highest level of accuracy. Spitch achieves this by combining unique mathematics, bespoke technology adaptation, and Swiss-made precision work-flow.
From the business angle, we believe that our speech technologies should not only deliver tangible business benefits to clients, meeting their present-day needs now, but also anticipate the future and created preparedness for it. We have achieved a breakthrough in the past 2 years developing solutions that outperform those of our major competitors in specific areas, and it could set us on course to become a leading company in biometric identification and continuous verification, for example. By outperforming I mean not only the technological advantages, clear business value such as cost saving, but also the power of bright new ideas.
We would like to become the leading provider of applications in all kinds of speech technologies, introducing a new culture, in which speech solutions are delivered as a unified interface platform, built upon the principles of artificial intelligence (AI).
Which industries went further than others in deploying voice based applications, and where do you see the biggest potential for the immediate future?
In the past decade, voice based solutions were mostly used in banking and telecom call centers as well as in healthcare, but this was largely an experimentation stage, considering the issues of accuracy and business relevance. Only in the past few years, we noted significant increase in demand and preparedness for speech technologies in financial services, insurance, and other sectors. There are many positive implementation examples across these industries: e.g. Barclays, Citibank, ING, Wells Fargo and others in banking. In the insurance segment, I like the examples of Manulife and American Family Insurance that deploy speech recognition, voice biometrics and chat apps. Some major airlines, telecoms, and retail companies use voice-driven IVR solutions. Examples are plentiful.
Jointly with our Swiss partners Crealogix and ti&m we developed two different voice operated mobile banking apps, for example. And also, SBB is planning to introduce a voice interface for their very successful mobile apps.
In the immediate future, I think that these apps will transform such services as getting legal advice, arranging insurance, booking travel and entertainment, healthcare services and many others. I would emphasize the importance of voice-driven apps for education too. The biggest potential now is in the sphere of customer service automation: processing of calls, voice-driven self-services, IVR, and mobile apps. We expect a rapid growth in the immediate future in deployment of biometric identification solutions. And finally, voice user interfaces for AI based personal assistants and chatbots. The overall impression is that speech technologies are firmly on their way to becoming mainstream. Those who will either wait too long or fail to capitalize on these disruptions soon might find themselves lagging behind the market leaders in the nearest future.
Software giants like Google or Apple are heavily investing in their speech and voice technology. In which areas can you outsmart them and bring better solutions to the market?
The main difference between medium-size vendors like us and Google, Apple, Baidu, and other major players is that those giants are almost entirely focused on a B2C model. They accumulate enormous amount of customer data and increasingly emerge as fintech players. Some banks, therefore, may regard them as potential competitors.
Our model is B2B and we can install a bespoke solution on your servers, precisely tailored to your company's needs and trained on your customers' audio-data. Spitch pays special attention to ensuring that both statutory and contractual data protection requirements are rigorously observed. All the big American players forward all their data to the US or at least to an external data center for processing. This is an issue for most countries' data protection experts and security-aware companies. Importantly, operating Spitch solutions does not require any cross-border transfer of sensitive personal data or other tricky procedures. Data stays in Switzerland in full accordance with the Swiss banking and personal data protection laws. This applies to other countries where we work as well.
These are the areas where we, as a B2B company, can outsmart and outperform the majors with our business model, ability to offer bespoke solutions and precision to clients, and unmatched flexibility in meeting their unique needs. In other words, we are not just supplying the technology, but also consulting on what, where and how should be done to achieve outstanding business results.
One area where voice identification and voice driven process automation could make a fast and substantial impact are Call Centers. Where do you see the best use of your technology in Call Centers and do you already have reference cases in that area?
Impressive impact can be achieved by call centres implementing the entire package of our speech technologies including a voice-driven IVR, voice biometric identification followed by continuous verification, where required, as well as subsequent automation of standard business processes such as replacing cards in banking, or changing a tariff package in telecom. Just imagine, automating most of the insurance claim forms fill-in in for the insurance company that works 24/7, for example. We have some references from insurance companies, and cases in healthcare sector, which we think are very promising.
We also have a good reference case with a telecom in UK, where our solution is used to recognize credit card numbers no matter how they are pronounced by a customer. ...
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