The speech-based services market has reached the early growth stages and is growing rapidly thanks to an expanding telephony subscriber base. The use of speech-based services is therefore significantly higher in this sector compared to enterprises from other verticals.

Investment in Value Added Services among the telecom operators has been mounting. The increasing competition has pressurised them to look for alternate revenue channels and to reduce their costs. They have consequently adopted IVR to deal with services such as billing and pricing information.

Every country however comes with its restrictions and India is no exception. There are awareness issues, firstly with the end users, as they have a distinct unawareness of the various speech-based services on offer. In addition to this they still prefer talking to a human rather than a machine. Secondly, companies are not aware of the utility and cost savings associated with an IVR solution.

Unlike markets in U.S.A and Europe, there is an abundance of economical workforce in India and IVR has not yet been able to replace a call centre agent for self service applications.

As for the future, users will continually be offered a large variety of content and thus acceptability of voice portals will improve. With increased usage, the user will get comfortable with pricing and speech based VAS would no longer be considered exorbitant.

For companies, the increase in non revenue generating calls from customer enquiries would ultimately lead them to diverting calls from agents to a more cost effective medium. If this transition is accepted well by customers and results in significant cost reduction, self-service applications in contact centres might be foreseeable.

India has 18 official languages and more than 1,600 commonly spoken variants and dialects. Entering the Indian market would mean that telisma would be one step further to completing its aim of wanting to make its speech technology as widely available as possible, allowing as many populations as possible to gain access to the services and information.
 
With such cultural diversity comes a fantastic richness in languages and as telisma knows from previous experience each language needs to be treated individually, and not just as a derivative of English!
 
Telisma undertook detailed research in to the different derivatives, the dialects and the location of where these different languages are spoken.