Speech analysis detects patterns in speech content and tone. It measures how often phrases are used and can be used to analyze conversations for businesses or law enforcement agencies. More sophisticated analysis can detect tone and context. Different types of speech analysis bring greater precision to results.
Speech analysis is a computer technique used to analyze speech content. It is not simply a speech-to-tech conversion tool. Instead, it’s designed to detect patterns in speech, including both content and tone.
The simplest use of speech analysis is to measure how often particular phrases are used. Before speech analysis, this was only possible by transcribing a recording and using a computer or manual search to look up particular phrases. With speech analytics, a computer system can be pre-programmed to “listen” for a particular word and can even produce real-time information.
There are multiple uses for this technology. A business with a call center could analyze conversations staff have with customers to detect patterns in complaints. For example, while call logs may show that a particular product causes many complaints or questions, voice analytics may show that a particular aspect of the product, such as a line in the instructions, is frequently mentioned. A law enforcement agency or security service could analyze the phone calls they monitor to see if a particular phrase is being mentioned by suspects.
More sophisticated speech analytics can be used to analyze tone and even context. For example, a telemarketing company typically tracks the percentage of calls made that result in a sale, but doesn’t necessarily have statistics to show why people declined the offer. Tone analysis may show that the number of people responding in an angry tone is disproportionately high at a certain time of day. This could suggest that the problem is not so much that the product is unattractive, but rather that people are annoyed by being called after a certain time and are more likely to be hostile to an attempt to sell regardless of the product.
There are several types of speech analysis, each of which brings greater precision to the results and increases both the time it takes to scan speech and the amount of speech it takes to detect a pattern. The simplest type is phonetic, which breaks down speech into individual sounds. While unsophisticated, this makes it easy to find new phrases without having to go over the speech from scratch. Keyword Finder searches for whole words right from the start. Continuous speech recognition of large words aims to effectively transcribe all speech, so that an entire conversation is available for analysis.
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