Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
A Speech Tech Boom and the Rise of the Data Engineer
By Scott Stephenson, CEO and co-founder of Deepgram
This
year, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted nearly every industry imaginable as we
relied more on virtual environments to stay connected, informed and agile to
the changes we faced every day. As enterprises sped up digital transformation adoption in response, we saw one major
trend emerge: understanding and leveraging voice data has never been as
essential as it is now. Data will continue to be a powerful asset for
enterprises in 2021-especially the critical and abundant insights that can be
unlocked through speech recognition technology. Here are a few of my top
predictions for 2021 related to speech technology, improved customer
experiences in call centers, and the rise of the data engineer role.
With most companies continuing remote work through 2021,
there will be a speech tech boom: The urgent shift to remote work has forced companies to quickly
adapt to a virtual office, with most meetings, sales presentations, HR
conversations, and more now taking place over video conferencing. In fact, Gartner believes the number of employees who work remotely at least
part time will increase to 60 percent by 2023, up from 30 percent before the
pandemic. As a result, we've seen more organizations invest in speech
recognition software to transcribe conversations, identify insights and trends,
and unlock key conversation insights for the business. Looking ahead, I predict
we will see more enterprises allocate budget to voice-enabled experiences-both
employee and customer-facing. At the same time, software providers will
aggressively fund speech-related product developments to break through the
noise and try to become the next big player in the customer experience (CX)
technology space.
Hiring data engineers will become a top priority: Both tech and non-tech organizations
know the inherent value of software engineers and data scientists, but many are
just starting to realize that they also need to hire a middle man: data
engineers. Data engineers are the individuals who capture raw data, clean it,
categorize it and provide it to data scientists, who then can build incredible
artificial intelligence (AI) models. In 2021 and beyond, I predict that the
data engineer role will be a bigger hiring priority across industry-leading
companies as the importance of understanding and implementing data becomes
critical.
Call centers will begin to embrace digital transformation
to boost customer experiences overall: Call centers today are often composed of entry-level
personnel who experience plenty of "bear with me" moments as they try to
troubleshoot in real-time. The call center of the future, on the other hand,
will automate the most mundane tasks-like resetting a password or changing an
address-and appropriately direct more detailed questions to humans within those
areas of expertise. I predict that by leaning on automation, call centers will
have more budget to train teams on more nuanced tasks, improving agent
retention and customer service for everyone as a whole. In turn, call centers
will be able better to serve their customers and their customers' needs.
While
2020 focused on adapting to new business challenges as they arose, I see 2021
as the year organizations will learn to embrace and implement the same technology
that helped them adjust to a COVID-19 world. We'll see the speech tech industry
grow faster than ever before to help organizations unlock critical data
insights from not only the call center but HR calls, sales presentations, and
internal company meetings. The data engineer's role will grow exponentially as
organizations continue to understand the importance of clean, digestible data
to build reliable AI models. As AI and machine learning models learn to handle
more complex issues and scenarios, organizations will serve their customers and
their needs better. Finally, call centers will undergo a digital
transformation, automating the most mundane tasks to allow call center
representatives to provide quality assistance for more complex issues or phone
calls and alleviate high volumes of assistance needed during peak periods.
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About the
Author
Scott Stephenson is a
dark matter physicist turned Deep Learning entrepreneur. He earned a PhD in
particle physics from University of Michigan where his research involved
building a lab two miles underground to detect dark matter. Scott left his
physics post-doc research position to found Deepgram.