Atlanta – Consumers often complain about computerized phone systems, but the technology has swept across the corporate landscape and isn’t likely to go away anytime soon.
North American businesses plunked down $3 billion for those automated systems and related services in 2004, and annual spending is expected to hit $3.8 billion by 2009, according to market analyst firm Datamonitor.
A growing number of small companies and freelance actors compete to provide human voices that direct callers through the phone systems. Demand for those voice pros is likely to grow as big businesses buy sophisticated speech-recognition systems, said Daniel Hong, a Datamonitor analyst.
Older systems encouraged callers to make selections by pressing numbers on their touch-tone phones. The speech recognition systems – some of which have already rolled out – allow callers to speak their choices. Hong predicts that not only will callers be doing more talking, so will the automated phone systems that guide them.
Perhaps half of all Fortune 1,000 companies still rely on their own staffs to provide voices for their phone systems. But companies outsourcing the work are becoming more demanding. Some ask for voice tryouts, listening to a dozen different actors before coming up with just the right amount of pep, maturity, youth, masculinity or whatever they think will work with callers.
“It’s all about creating this virtual personality,” said Marcus Graham, founder of GM Voices, an Alpharetta, Ga., company believed to be the nation’s biggest provider of voice prompts for interactive phone systems.
The company, which counts Cingular Wireless, Charles Schwab Corp., IBM and Wells Fargo among its customers, recorded nearly 24,000 voice prompts last month and expects to grow its revenue 30 percent to $3 million this year, Graham said.
He’s also expanded into international arenas, with a fifth of his revenue tied to supplying voices in more than 60 languages, he says.
A nice, natural-sounding voice won’t necessarily appease consumers increasingly disgruntled with mazelike phone systems that make it hard to talk with a human being. Still, Graham said his firm’s voices can blunt some of that displeasure, as long as companies give callers a quick and easy way to reach a live person.
Paul English, who launched a website, gethuman.com, to give consumers secrets on how to cut through automated phone systems, said a better option is if more companies just let consumers speak to a person upfront.
Another issue facing the voice industry is the potential impact of a technology called text-to- speech.
The systems ingest a one-time series of recordings from voice actors and then slice and dice them for years, building and rebuilding the actors’ voices to say whatever the company needs.
