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Technology Stocks : PERI (Periphonics) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mel Spivak who wrote (1148)	4/5/1998 6:10:00 PM
From: John F Beule	Respond to of 1682

It looks good that Periphonics will be the hardware behind this, as they have been working with Nuance forever. Sears Will Deploy Speech-Recognition System (04/05/98; 11:48 a.m. EST) By Mary E. Thyfault, InformationWeek Sears, Roebuck and Co. will announce next week that it is deploying a nationwide speech-recognition system. The company said it is the first retailer to do so. The system, based on the Nuance 6 speech-recognition engine from Nuance Communications of Menlo Park, Calif., will let callers simply tell a computer what department they want in a local store. The system will handle an average of 120,000 calls a day, or three-quarters of in-bound calls, allowing Sears to redeploy almost 3,000 operators to other jobs. "Instead of the phone ringing 30 or 40 times, on the first ring, it will get answered and routed," said Terry McGinnis, national manager of store office policy and procedure at Sears. About 60 percent to 70 percent of time, calls will be directly transferred to the appropriate department. The success rate shoots up to more than 90 percent when customers say additional words, such as product names, that the system is trained to recognize. Sears said it will have deployed the system to more than 700 stores as of next week. "This is a killer application," said Bill Meisel, president of consultancy TMA Associates, in Tarzana, Calif. "It helps retailers respond to their customers." In the past year, as speech-recognition technology has gotten more accurate, industries such as financial services and travel have started to implement it. Now Meisel and other analysts expect retailers to follow Sears' lead. Until now, it was believed that speech-recognition systems had to handle at least 90 percent of calls immediately. But that's no longer the case. "There is a lot of pressure to save money, and these systems do handle 60 percent of calls," said John Obertoefer, president of Boston's Voice Information Associates. Meisel projects worldwide speech-recognition equipment sales to boom from $10 million in 1998 to $580 million in 2003. "This is going to be the way people expect business phones to be answered," he said.