Critical business data

As a Technical Operations Consultant for Google, I work with businesses large and small to help them with understanding, implementing, and improving Google Cloud Speech-to-Text (STT) and Text-to-Speech (TTS). I have seen a wide range of business use cases, including nonprofit human services, retail, mobile, and more.

Business objectives typically vary. Some clients are looking to support adherence to regulatory requirements, and others want insight into how customers feel about their products and services.

Call centers

Quality

“This call may be monitored or recorded for quality and training purposes.”

With thousands of calls a day, how is it possible for a business to cost-effectively monitor calls for quality? Speech-to-Text can help. Once call recordings are transcribed, the text transcriptions can be further analyzed by software, and reports can be produced to check quality standards.

Call quality analysis can be done through AI solutions or simple scripts. A business that requires all call center staff to make a greeting such as, “Thank you for calling Rubies Rugs, how may I help you?” can use code to check that every transcription of a call contains that phrase.

AI tools like sentiment analysis might be applied to transcripts for insights into the customer experience, and for further information about the quality of caller interactions.

Call center agent assistance

When a customer places an order by phone, the conversation may include information about products, product options, prices, quantities, shipping dates, and other data. With Speech-to-Text, these data can be captured and used to trigger service agent facing tools. An order form that is on the agent’s screen could be populated with information the caller has already provided.

Healthcare

Doctor's notes

Physicians spend a lot of time and energy writing up details about patient visits. Freeing doctors from this burden would allow high-quality time with subjects, and would enable doctors to serve more people.

Some healthcare organizations supply staff with audio devices to help capture information that can lead to better quality outcomes, and can assist with documenting diagnoses.

Speech-to-Text can be leveraged to transcribe this audio and feed the text to other software packages for record-keeping and other care needs.

Legal

Regulatory compliance

There are mountains of regulations that businesses must meet. With inter-office call audio transcripts, legal teams can pull together evidence that the company is in compliance.

Immigration

As part of the immigration process in the United States, many candidates must go through an interview process. To generate documents that support a case for immigration, audio transcripts from interviews can be obtained.

Human rights

I worked with a nonprofit that was building a mobile application to capture interviews with victims of abuse, trafficking, and other right violations. The app uses Speech-to-Text to help capture and document the victim reports.

Law enforcement

Another government entity I worked with had the challenge of capturing details of on-the-scene street interviews with witnesses of potential crimes. Police and other officials were outfitted with mobile devices to record and process the interview audio.

Other uses

Voice commands

Do you happen to have a cable TV remote that you can talk to? That capability is powered by Speech-to-Text. Any Google product that includes voice commands is using the API to trigger actions based on spoken words.

Video transcription

People don’t just want or need to see; they also read. Visit YouTube and you can see video transcription in action.

Live streaming

STT can help people who have challenges with hearing by displaying the transcript of any live event.

Business meetings

STT helps document meetings to ensure that nothing is missed and that agreements are understood in context.

Shareholder quarterly reports

Members of the U.S. stock exchanges must deliver earnings calls in which the company reports their financial details and business plans. Stock owners can also get their questions answered. These interactions are highly regulated and STT can capture these calls to assist with compliance.

In the next lesson we will review the technical prerequisites as well as knowledge prerequisites.