The recently published report, “The Forrester New Wave™: AI-Fueled Speech Analytics Solutions, Q2 2018” report identified the 11 most significant players in this market: Aspect, CallMiner, Clarabridge, Cogito, Genesys, Invoca, Mattersight, NICE, OpenText, Tethr, and Verint.

Based on our comprehensive criteria, Forrester identified CallMiner and NICE as Leaders in the space today. Forrester’s clients can read the entire report here.

This New Wave is a follow-up to the “New Tech: AI-Fueled Speech Analytics Solutions, Q2 2018” report that I coauthored with Kjell Carlsson, Ph.D..

Some interesting takeaways from our research:

  • Transcription models need tuning (or it’ll get weird). We conducted an audio transcription test as a key input into the language models criterion and discovered that many out-of-the-box transcription models easily make mundane errors (“let me get” mistakenly transcribed to “let me guess”) and sometimes run wildly off course (“microelectromechanical” turned into “my girl went from the town hall”). Additionally, while alphanumeric capture has been bulletproof in the phone channel for IVR, when it comes to speech analytics, the functionality is still catching up.
  • Real-time capabilities are just getting started. The implementation of speech analytics with real-time capabilities varies widely, but more than two-thirds of the vendors we evaluated offered some real-time functionality within their solutions. Many vendors offer real-time notifications, word spotting, and redaction; the differentiating solutions have all those elements, plus real-time transcription and analytics on the agent desktop.
  • Use cases are slowly expanding. While many of the vendors in our evaluation offer their solutions primarily geared toward a contact center use case, several of our top-scoring vendors also demonstrated product improvement, marketing optimization, and sales optimization as use cases for their solutions. With more vendors specializing in non-contact-center use cases, we’re likely to see an expansion of potential use cases for this technology as the market matures.

Use the AI-fueled speech analytics New Wave to help you evaluate vendors based on your strategy and business needs. If you’re a Forrester client, you can read the New Wave report here and the preceding New Tech report here. If you’re interested in learning more about our findings, set up an inquiry with inquiry@forrester.com.

(Sarah Dawson contributed to this blog.)