Getting Into Voice Recognition, One Foot At A Time

<B> Getting Into Voice Recognition, One Foot At A Time</B>

By Sarah Welt

While speech recognition technology is beginning to gain momentum, the travel industry still is hesitating to jump in with both feet.

A few of the big travel agency players, both megas and super regionals, have pushed ahead in the race to get a voice product to customers sooner rather than later. But industry insiders say the technology is likely to follow the development track of automated booking systems, where many players rushed to get in on the early development, only to step back two years later and co-brand with the systems that the market considered best of breed.

American Express has partnered with hardware company Perophonics Corp., Bohemia, N.Y., and Nuance Communications Inc., Menlo Park, Calif., for its speech product, code named Paris. Amex will begin three one-month client beta tests in May, followed by a phased rollout. The company's target is to be able to handle a quarter of a million transactions through Paris by the end of this year. David Pereira, Amex's senior manager, corporate services interactive group, said the accuracy of each prompt is 96 percent, and the system has 99 percent accuracy on successful transactions.

GTE Internetworking, which acquired early speech pioneer BBN Corp. in June 1996, and Omega World Travel, Fairfax, Va., have been working for the past few years to bring a speech product to market. Unlike Amex, which will keep its system proprietary, GTE intends to sell its product--which is scheduled to roll out in the second quarter--to the industry. GTE and several of Omega's largest customers currently are using the system in beta tests.

The product is being marketed by GTE as Travel Xpress, and by Omega as MegTel II. Terry Sullo, former BBN travel manager and now manager of business development for travel for the BBN technology division of GTE Internetworking, said we are "likely to see more than one of the top ten agencies" using the product in the future.

World Travel Partners in Atlanta is in talks and a test right now with BBN Hark, according to president Danny Hood. Hood sees voice as an alternative to Internet access and thinks the company will be testing voice recognition this year with clients.

The BBN system works in two steps. Travelers call the system to enter trip information, and receive a fax or e-mail with a listing of six outbound and six return flights and a matrix of 36 fares, in which corporate negotiated rates can be presented. Then the traveler calls back with his or her selected flight option. Sullo said the product can be integrated as the front-end piece to existing automated booking systems as well.

Leading on the development side is IBM, which has been in the voice recognition business for 25 years. It already has a successful speech product it calls Via Voice on the consumer market and three products in development or in pilot mode for the travel industry.

Claude Guay, global executive of marketing and business development for IBM's travel and transportation industry unit, said the company already has spent "millions" of dollars on speech products, and sees the travel industry, with its various points of checkin, as a good market for the technology.

IBM is focusing on speech systems to address checkin and to use in a res center environment. Voice technology could identify callers and route them to the appropriate reservationist or be used to complete bookings. "We're trying to get away from the telephone keypad," said Guay. Where "decisions on the keypad get too big," voice systems "increase customer service by making it faster for the consumer and decrease cost by not having customers spend that much time on an 800 line."

Guay said IBM hopes to have both the voice activated checkin and speech-enabled booking tools "demo in a live environment this year."

IBM also is working on what it refers to as proactive call management technology. When a customer calls in, he is prompted to say something; the computer listens in on the conversation and interrupts if the agent forgets a piece of the process. Guay declined to give a time frame for a product rollout.

Guay acknowledged that while there is a lot of activity in the market, there is very little of the technology in actual use in a live environment. That is due in part to challenges in integrating products with legacy systems on the back end, he said.

"The existing systems were not designed to do that, so a layer of technology is needed between them to make these complete solutions," Guay said. "We see this as another one of the distribution channels, so the idea is to build through architecture solutions not just for voice recognition, but Internet booking and self-service kiosks. IBM has developed solutions to do that."

Via World Network, the subsidiary of Andersen Consulting, offers clients two ways to communicate with suppliers: through Via Online or Via Voice. (This Via Voice, which confusingly has the same name as IBM's speech software, is a totally independent Via World product.) Via's voice product is now in production and will go live in January with Andersen Consulting, its first corporate client. The company is also in final negotiations with a handful of othcorporate customers.

The speech system takes live bookings and communicates with suppliers for air, hotel and car. It can "automate the entire refunds/reissue and exchange process for those transactions created using Via Voice or Via Online," said technology and operations vice president Patrick McHale. He noted that the Via system can keep the historical booking record and pricing record to allow for the creation of a financial transaction from a historical pricing record, something that "neither the CRSs, travel agencies or airlines themselves are capable of doing in the marketplace today."

Additionally, the company has direct links to US Airways and Northwest and is adding one with Continental. The next version of Via Voice, due out this month, will also allow multiple forms of payment.

Sabre director of marketing Peter Stevens said the company has canvassed customers in the last six to nine months and "voice doesn't hit a lot of their radar screens." Sabre still talks with speech recognition companies, however, and continues to research voice technology.

Beyond American Express, the megas have yet to make the plunge into speech recognition either. BTI Americas continues to look at voice, but maintains the technology is "not as developed as we'd like to see," said director of information technology solutions Ellen Trotochaud.

At Maritz Travel, voice is being talked about, but "we have not implemented any voice recognition-based travel solutions," said Richard Spradling, corporate vice president of information technology. However, Spradling said he recently met with four major suppliers of speech-based solutions and "the message I came away with is that 1998 will probably be the year speech recognition comes to the forefront." Maritz "will probably deploy a couple of pilots," he said.

Rosenbluth International has yet to jump on the voice bandwagon. Chief travel scientist Danamichele O'Brien said there "hasn't been a lot of buy-side demand," and "we've got to justify R&D to clients.." As of today, "the travel management company has not made a financial investment in it."

The Mt. Laurel, N.J.-based Travel One sees voice on the horizon, though not necessarily next on the table, according to Alan Brown, vice president of business systems. The travel management company did focus groups on voice technology with Cambridge, Mass.-based Pure Speech. But Brown said that while customers are interested in the concept, "There is a great deal of skepticism that the technology is ready and that people are ready to accept it and use it for this application.