Keep Unified Communications from Turning into a Disaster

Lost in call routing tree

Unified Communications is a fancy word for a business phone system that integrates multiple communication technologies and methods into a single platform. This is a natural evolution of a system originally designed for voice communications. UC has the capability to ultimately take your communications to the next level and optimize the way your organization interacts. … Read more

Enhanced 911 Spelled Out

911 Emergency

While first implemented by AT&T in the late 60’s, 911 didn’t become a standard channel for accessing emergency services in the United States until 1972, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recommended that 911 be implemented nationwide. The 911 service initially included basic routing of calls to local police departments, but in 1975 Bell Labs … Read more

Hosted PBX Unwrapped Series: Challenges of Automatic Voice Recognition

As computer use becomes ubiquitous, it is increasingly desirable to communicate with them in the same way that we communicate with one another: using human speech. Voice or Speech Recognition technology aims to do just this. Personally, I fell in love with the concept of voice recognition ever since I first saw “Star Trek, The New Generation” series. Unfortunately, my first attempt at making a productive use of speech recognition in Microsoft Windows 3.1 was rather disappointing.

Today our ability to use voice recognition is limited to issuing system commands to speed up familiar functions. So what prevents us from talking to our personal computers and phone systems (those are quickly converging into one) ? What you may not realize is that speech recognition is a rather complicated and resource intensive task. 

Humans easily and efficiently relay information via speech despite many complications, including background noise, slips related to spontaneous speech (stammers, filled pauses, false starts, etc.) and the inherent variability of human speech.

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