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February 8, 1999 Data Mining For AudioDragon Systems uses speech recognition to cull data from call-center tapes By Mary E. Thyfault
 peech-recognition vendor Dragon Systems Inc. this week will demonstrate technology that combines speech recognition and search capabilities to pull information from audio tapes of customer service calls."Creative people will soon be phone mining for nuggets of gold about their customers," says Roger Matus, VP of marketing for Dragon. Dragon has refined its NaturallySpeaking speech-recognition technology to convert audio tapes into text that can be indexed and searched. A user can type or speak a search request, such as "How many people used the word lavender when ordering clothes on Sunday?" The system provides a text response. Users can also listen to excerpts of taped conversations. Many call centers keep tapes of incoming calls to monitor customer service and for legal purposes. Currently, the primary way of gathering data from such conversations is to direct service reps to ask specific questions of customers and log their responses into a database. Dragon's technology promises to let users search for information after the calls take place. For example, an employer evaluating its health insurer could search calls from employees to see how many used the word frustrated when talking about the insurer. The technology is based on models of the way call-center representatives and customers interact. It was refined to deal with the poor quality of call-center tapes; callers tend to speak in less structured language when talking with a representative on the phone than when talking to a computer or when they expect their comments to be transcribed, says Matus. But some IT professionals still question the reliability of speech-recognition technology. "It's getting a lot better, but it is not quite at the level where I'd feel good about it," says Tom Loane, CIO of Transport International Pool, a division of GE Capital Services. Dragon plans to test its technology by midyear and make it available by year's end. Pricing has yet to be determined. 
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