There appears on the horizon a seven-fold rise in global enterprise expenditure on transactional-enabling voice solutions, a new report by Datamonitor is predicting.
The report, “Emerging voice applications: towards voice transactions,” predicts global voice-enabled transactional solutions will earn technology vendors revenues of $377m by year end 2008 compared to $56m today. “Not so long ago, e-Commerce was heralded by many as a ‘flash in the pan’ technology. Many of those sceptics are also predicting short life for transactional voice solutions too. But should vendors continue to produce solid offerings that customers enjoy using, the sceptics will be proven wrong once again,” says Peter Ryan, Datamonitor technology analyst and author of the report.
Voice-automated self-service interfaces, which allow end-users to conduct commercial transactions, have the potential to help companies reduce variable overhead costs and are also ideal for expanding self-service revenue generation.
The most popular transactional voice solutions currently in use include account management, order processing, pay-as-you-go top-up and reservations. From the standpoint of account management, the main provisions being deployed by enterprises include bill payment provisions, which are proving popular with both telcos and utilities.
According to Datamonitor, in North America and Europe, the Middle-East and Africa (EMEA), uptake in transactional voice solutions will be substantial, accounting for 75% of the global market by 2008. Growth in Asia-Pacific (APAC) will also be strong, due to voice business proliferation in Japan, China and Australia / New Zealand. However, Datamonitor says it is unlikely that transactional technology will be massively adopted in the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA), due to legacy technology and economic limitations.