You better start strengthening those vocal cords! Voice-controlled business process automation? New tool of the future? Want to find out more?

Let us ask you a question: have you ever spent soooo much time tracking down data? Had a problem with communication across different channels? Felt like you were literally unable to access the one piece of information you had been looking for like an hour? We probably know your answer, but we also have a fascinating insight into an example solution…

Futurelearn’s survey says: since the start of the pandemic, 55.7% of respondents have become more tech-reliant. Employees use as many as four to five different types of computer programs every workday. That means jumping from Trello to Asana to Clickup to Slack to…

How to become even more productive in our everyday jobs? Maybe by losing manual activities? A new trend has arisen; voice-controlled business process automation.

Voice technology is in the process of becoming an essential element of the next generation. Right now, smart speakers are used for a small number of tasks, such as listening to music or checking the weather. But what if we could change it? Improve it?

Pindrop delivers the stats: 28% of businesses communicate with customers via voice technology. Most important assistants?Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa.

In 2018, Tractica conducted a survey. In that survey, the team predicted that in 2 years, speech recognition will get its numbers up, and by up we mean from 45% of all mobile devices to… 82%! Pindrop also sees the forthcoming changes: the number of businesses using the voice to interact with their customers will triple. Over two-thirds plan to use voice in the majority of interactions.

94% of managers see voice technology as an important driver of customer satisfaction.

88% believe they will gain a competitive advantage.

57% believe it will increase operational efficiencies

57% also believe it will reduce the cost of each customer transaction

85% believe that customer fears about the misuse of their data will slow the introduction of the technology

82% of businesses predict consumers will have concerns over fraud

https://www.pindrop.com/blog/welcoming-conversational-economy-securing-voice-channel

According to Forbes, as many as 12 areas can translate into effective automation of business processes:

1. Development of call centers
   Want to use less employee time?Interactive voice responses or “robocalls” are able to do it for you. They guarantee significant automation of processes and do not require additional help. One (1) downside? They just make every person who picks up their phone really pissed off.
2. Strengthening the internal communication
   The modules also support communication within the company. With the use of voice automation, employees can easily access documentation, search for databases more efficiently or even ask questions about the company’s policy! The answer can easily be generated in seconds.
3. Search support
   Voice search can be more accurate than manual typing. We are just passing the knowledge.
4. Faster access to big data
   Hard-to-reach data catalogs? Going crazy? Cannot use Ctrl + F? Easy there… By voice-controlled automation, this activity can become less insufferable. There is also an ability to automatically generate charts and statistics!
5. Voice-coding
   Yeah, we know, chatGPT makes us kind of scared too, but it is important to remember that we are still important as employees and masters in our craft. Maybe voice-controlled automation would help in the process of coding and improve it?
6. Support of IT departments
   You would find out about the defects of the company’s equipment so much faster. Also, automatically generated questions would probably be more precise!
7. Integration with business applications
   Voice would streamline access to them. Better, easier, faster. 
8. Improvement of meetings
   Imagine how badass you would feel if you just sat through the entire meeting and then just said “DISCONNECT” the second someone asks you a question. Girl.
9. Greater mobility in the workplace
   Yeah, we know, we have been putting pressure on leaving your station every 30 minutes. Voice automation would actually help to make it happen! Imagine: you’re standing in the corner of your room and go “Hey xxx put print(“Hello World!”) into my code” and IT DOES IT!
10. Cost optimization
    Increased well-being of employees?Partial independence from the desktop equipment? Faster access to documentation? It all together literally screams “significant save on expenses”!
11. Increasing the security of the financial sector
    The voice-automation would be an enormous help in verifying customers' identity, for example, when opening bank accounts.
12. Increase in productivity
    The areas that would undergo voice automation would translate into the productivity of the entire organization. As we said before: better, easier, faster.

According to Pindrop, 85% of businesses gear up to use voice technology as soon as next year! That means that voice technology recognition and voice assistants need to meet “the human standard”. That means becoming intelligent to the extent that they are able to change the workflow in the enterprise. How can we make that happen?

1.    Leaving call and response in the past. The assistants have to become more conversational

2.    Voice technology becoming so sophisticated that there is no fear of breaking it

3.    Making it understand how to extract metadata and what is emotion, intent, and nuance.

Our world is dynamic. Synthetic sound is notable to comprehend real-world situations. Thus why testing voice technology in strict environments is problematic. Because of the lack of universal standards, the industry has to change its opinions about it, both in testing and performance.Until then, regrettably, businesses will continue to do things the old-fashioned way.