Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories’ Voice Idol competition demonstrates how speech applications can improve the customer experience

An innovative voice automation developer from Germany has emerged as the best creator of voice software to improve customer service, in an annual competition that spans Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., an Alcatel-Lucent company (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU), today announced the winner of the Voice Idol Award from its annual user conference, G-Force, EMEA in London. The award, sponsored by IBM, was won by the German speech-solution company D+S solutions.

The Voice Idol concept was established by Genesys to acknowledge the growing importance of speech applications in everyday life and was viewed as an innovative way to showcase the latest applications. Speech recognition has taken time to be reliable enough for businesses to use but with technical standards such as Voice XML, which provides a standard way to program voice dialogues, rapid developments in speech solutions have brought speech recognition into the business mainstream. According to Datamonitor, companies spent $1.2 billion on such solutions in 2005, and this is forecast to grow by 22% a year to reach $3.2 billion by 2010.

Companies entered the Voice Idol competition from seven different EMEA countries (UK, Ireland, Belgium, South Africa, Germany, Pakistan and France.)

The competition had three key categories:

Financial Services/Healthcare won by D+S solutions
Telco/Government/Utilities won by Vicorp
Horizontal applications (such as messaging, status, and locator) also won by Vicorp

The winner of each category award was decided by a group of distinguished industry figures including Ri Pierce-Grove, Senior Analyst at Datamonitor and chaired by Tom Houwing, Founder and Director of voiceandvision. The overall winner was voted for by the 900-strong audience at the G-Force conference, after viewing demonstrations by the category winners.

D+S solutions won with its application ACS-TC, which delivers automated voice services for telecommunications companies offering intelligent call steering functionality for the most common customer requests such as account status, shop-finder, address-change, etc.

“We are happy that we were able to create an application that is convincing industry professionals and is appealing to the end user at the same time. The buzz surrounding our product at this event shows us that we are on the right path,” stated Christian Pereira, Managing Director of D+S solutions.

Vicorp won their category awards for a mortgage identification and verification system and for speech application support for a pay per view provider.

“Speech applications are finally coming of age and becoming a regular part of our lives, especially in customer care. It has also become an integral part of Genesys’s business,” stated Bruce Eidsvick, Genesys Vice President, Voice Platform Sales, EMEA. “The Genesys Voice Platform, combined with the applications taking part in Voice Idol, is empowering companies to introduce more and more speech enabled solutions into the contact center, both improving the customer experience and keeping costs down.”