Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
In 2022, Companies Will Demand More Sophisticated AI Use Cases
By Scott
Stephenson, CEO and
co-founder of Deepgram
The pandemic has placed a huge
spotlight on virtual interactions between companies and their customers and
employees, making it more important than ever to get maximum value from the
resulting data trail. In that large data set, is unstructured speech data, and
companies have started to realize just how much information can be unearthed
from it. As we head into 2022 - year three of digital-first communications - we
will see companies demand more sophisticated, revenue-generating use cases of
speech technology that leverage their data, such as real-time solutions. Here
are a few of my top predictions for 2022 related to speech technology, reducing
bias and consumption of these services.
Concerted
Efforts by Vendors to Reduce Bias in Speech Tech
Voice is the most natural form of
communication. However, machines have historically been locked out of listening
and analyzing conversations. In 2022, machines will be able to do more than
just describe which words were said, but how
they were said. This will enable users to truly understand what their customers
want and empathize with their needs. Reducing bias in speech infrastructure
will also be a top priority for vendors so that users of their technology can
more accurately understand the voices of various backgrounds, genders, and
languages of their customers.
From
Compliance to Cash Cow
In 2021, companies utilized automatic speech
recognition (ASR) primarily for operational efficiency, compliance and
regulatory mandates. Due to the ongoing pandemic, shift to remote work and
digital-first experiences, we saw an appetite from companies looking to
leverage ASR for more customer-facing use cases that had the power to increase
company revenue (e.g., real time analytics use cases).
In 2022, we expect to see more enterprises
expanding beyond batch into real-time use cases. Companies will look to
AI-powered ASR to gain valuable customer insights in real-time, rather than
waiting days or weeks for a less accurate transcription to be available. This
will allow them to quickly address valuable feedback and improve company
performance-leading to increased revenue and customer satisfaction overall.
Furthermore, with AI-powered ASR, enterprises won't have to trade accuracy for
speed or lower costs.
Users
will opt for best of breed APIs over all-in-one big box solutions
Every business has a unique speaker base of
multiple languages, dialects, genders. In 2022, we will see companies expand
beyond English-only speech recognition into additional languages, depending on
customers' geography. Not only will we see languages expand, but customers will
also look to customized solutions that address specific product names and use
cases. As a result, builders of voice-enabled experiences will prefer best of
breed APIs with robust onboarding tools, as they will make speech recognition
easy to implement and customize according to their business goals.
While 2021 was a year of
experimenting with the potential of unstructured speech data-2022 will be a
year of expansion. Companies now understand the value that speech data can
bring to their organizations and want to tap into that information faster. With
ongoing advancements in AI and machine learning, extracting knowledge in
real-time is entirely possible and will become the status quo in 2022.
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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.