New York Times article on the growing use of speech recognition in business.
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nytimes.com
June 21, 1998
The Voice on the Phone Is Not Human, but
It's Helpful
By JOHN MARKOFF
Later this year, many callers wanting flight information from United
Airlines will speak not to a person but to a computer that acts like one.
It will ask when and where the caller wants to travel, look up flight
schedules and converse using synthesized speech.
A caller can say, "I want to fly from New York to San Jose next
Wednesday morning." The system recognizes the names of 1,200 airports
around the world and understands concepts like "next Wednesday."
Employing advanced forms of artificial intelligence, it interacts with a caller
just as an agent might, even checking to confirm that it has heard correctly
-- "Did you say Austin or Boston?"
United's system is only one example of a
wave of new computer technologies that
understand spoken language and are
poised to sweep through the American
economy. In areas as diverse as airline
reservations, retailing, directory
assistance, banking, medical transcription,
computer help desks and secretarial
services, machines that can recognize
thousands of words and phrases -- and in
accents as diverse as Brooklyn and
Pakistani -- are rapidly becoming
commonplace.
"Speech recognition has passed a
threshold," said Raymond Kurzweil, a
leading researcher in the field of artificial
intelligence. In the next few years, he
predicted, "The bulk of business
transactions will take place between a
person and an automated personality."
There could be problems at first. Some
people will have to speak more slowly or
clearly than they normally do. And the
computers still get tripped up by jargon,
accents and questions they are not
programmed to answer. For example, an
airline reservations system might find
itself stumped by a question about ground
transportation.
But the systems promise customers new
ease in performing every type of
transaction. Executives at companies
developing the technology say that
speech recognition systems are being
eagerly embraced by consumers who
have grown weary of waiting for
customer service representatives and of
using a keypad to navigate the seemingly
endless mazes of automated menus.
And the relatively few consumers who
have found themselves talking to a
computer are generally positive about the
experience.
For users of United Airline's speech
recognition system, there is often a
reaction of wonder when they realize that
a computer understands their words.
"Sometimes it feels like it's smarter than I
am," said Tony Molinaro, a United
manager. He began using the company's
reservation system, which is now
available only to employees, several
months ago and routinely uses it to book
flights.
At first he said his sessions would take
slightly longer than with a human being
because the computer would ask him
additional questions about which airport
he wanted to travel to in the Los Angeles
area. But he has since become an expert
user.
The system has enough sophistication to
know about the members of his family
who are eligible to fly. For example,
when he refers to his father, the
computer asks, "Do you mean Ben?"
"It's very neat that it understands me,"
Molinaro said.
Nor does the user's age appear to have
any bearing on the ease of adapting to
speech recognition. Arthur Edwards of
Fort Myers, Fla., 82, is a satisfied user of
the voice service offered by Charles
Schwab & Co., the discount stockbroker.
"I like to get stock quotes and don't like to
have to wait," Edwards said. The system
almost always recognizes without error
the stocks he mentions, he said, although
he did recall that it once had trouble with
some stocks traded on a Hong Kong exchange.
Edwards said he was quite comfortable talking to computers. "I've seen lots
of changes in my life," he said, "and these days I spend my time trying to
keep up with the grandchildren."
At the same time, the new systems will have a big effect on the American
work force. The number of jobs created or destroyed by such systems is a
matter of much debate. But many labor experts agree that the new
technologies will contribute to the growing polarization of the job market into
high- and low-skilled jobs and a corresponding disparity in wealth.
On one hand, they will create high-paying jobs for computer programmers
and for the many marketing people who sell their work. But in the process,
they will destroy semiskilled jobs in customer service, and many people now
earning moderate incomes will be forced to move into low-skill jobs at the
bottom of the employment ladder.
"This is the scariest economic problem of our time," said Timothy
Bresnahan, an economist at Stanford University who has studied the effect
of new technologies on income distribution. "The most important
technological changes tend to be related to big changes in the distribution in
wages."
Indeed, jobs that have been among the fastest growing, like travel
reservations, telephone sales and customer service, are in danger of being
replaced by inexpensive and increasingly flexible speech recognition
systems.
Last month, Sears, Roebuck & Co. became the nation's first retailer to
install a computer system that answers all phone calls at the company's 833
stores, responding to queries and automatically routing calls to the right
department.
Sears executives say that while 3,000 jobs were affected by the new
system, no workers were laid off. Because of the strength of the economy,
the company was able to reassign its telephone operators to new jobs as
sales and stocking clerks, but those jobs might not be possible in times of
slower economic growth.
The same bullish economy is also fostering widespread investment in speech
recognition technologies.
Last fall, Charles Schwab began allowing customers to buy and sell mutual
funds over the phone using software developed by a Silicon Valley start-up,
Nuance Communications. The system understands the names of more than
1,300 funds and can respond to requests for price quotes for more than
13,000 stocks.
In March, American Express Co., the nation's largest travel agency, began
testing a service that will allow its corporate customers to call computers for
flight information or to make airline, hotel and car reservations.
Automation has already had a profound
effect on telephone operators. According to
the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number
of jobs for telephone, directory assistance
and in-house operators fell to 164,000 from
400,000 between 1970 and 1996, a decline of
236,000 jobs.
More than a fifth of those -- 51,000 jobs --
have been lost in the six years since the first
rudimentary speech recognition was
introduced, according to labor economists
and AT&T executives. That system, which
can recognize just five terms -- "collect,"
"operator," "third party," "credit card" and
"person to person" -- saves "several hundred
million" dollars a year, most of it in labor
costs, AT&T says.
Since 1907, when AT&T and Western
Electric Co. combined their engineering
operations and created the Bell Telephone
Laboratory, the growth of the telephone
industry has been marked by cycles of huge
expansions in employment followed by
periods of automation.
The era of operators who manually
connected calls at large plug boards began to end in 1919, when mechanical
switching was introduced, ushering in the era of dial telephones. The first
automated call processing went into service in Brooklyn in 1938, but it was
not until an entirely electronic switching system was introduced in 1963 that
operators began to disappear entirely from the process of completing calls.
More recently, the creation of "megacenters" that handle calls for large
regions has significantly reduced phone company employment.
Among the workers affected by the concentration of jobs in such centers
was Addie Brinkley, who after 40 years of working as an operator in eight
different cities quit her job in August 1996 after AT&T closed its call center
in Modesto, Calif., and asked her to move to Reno.
Ms. Brinkley's job had fallen victim to a new computerized system that
performed many of the functions traditionally handled by operators. AT&T
executives say they accomplished the cutbacks with almost no layoffs, but
union representatives and operators like Ms. Brinkley tell a more unsettling
story.
Her decision to quit rather than move to a directory assistance megacenter
in Reno, she said, mirrored the experience of thousands of other phone
company workers who have been eased out in the last six years.
"I saw thousands of people lose their jobs," she said, "and I saw the
devastated lives."
While few economists assert that speech recognition will be a job killer
overall, many predict that like other information-based technologies
introduced in the last decade, it will bring profound changes, positive and
negative, for workers and consumers.
While today's speech recognition systems are not perfect -- United Airlines
officials said their system had a call completion rate of 98 percent -- they
are adequate when used with scripts that reduce the range of expected
human answers. And they will improve rapidly if the development of current
speech recognition technology is any indicator.
"It's a confluence of small things, from better software design to
dramatically cheaper and faster computers," said Ronald Croen, chief
executive of Nuance. "There was no single breakthrough."
Speech recognition began in the 1960s when computer scientists at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University,
Stanford University and other centers began to research the idea with
financing from the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, which
created the original Internet.
Despite the optimism of researchers and prototypes built in the 1980s,
commercial applications remained elusive. It was not until the early 1990s
that companies ranging from giants like IBM to start-ups like Dragon
Systems began offering the first commercial systems. These systems,
designed for personal computers, initially recognized only individual words
and forced users to speak slowly and unnaturally.
The commercial turning point came in 1992, when AT&T introduced the
five-term speech recognition technology into its nationwide long-distance
network.
One indicator of the effect that speech recognition
is likely to have in the workplace emerged soon
after the United Parcel Service lost its battle with
the teamsters' union last August. Scrambling for
new ways to save labor costs, UPS quietly
deployed a speech recognition system developed
by Nuance that gives package tracking
information in response to a caller's spoken
commands. Last Christmas Eve, the system
handled 193,000 calls, double the daily average for
UPS. Company officials declined to say what the
system cost but said it had paid for itself in less
than three months.
Rand Wilson, a teamsters spokesman, said that the
system had resulted in "a tremendous loss of workers," adding, "This has
been a contentious issue."
For Croen of Nuance, the changes are justified because the jobs that are
being replaced are so tedious. He cites annual employee turnover rates of
more than 60 percent for call centers at which operators answer repetitive
questions.
However unrewarding the work, some labor experts worry about the
number of jobs at risk.
"One of the main sources for new jobs for the middle class over the past 15
years have been telephone sales and information-related," said Robert
Reich, the former secretary of labor, who is a professor of economic and
social policy at Brandeis University. "Now all those jobs are on the line."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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