U.K. national TV broadcaster BBC One's early evening daily magazine program, The One Show, reported on voice self-service systems Aug. 25, and concluded—perhaps to their own surprise—that 'speech recognition systems do work and are here to stay.

Sabio's Peter Galloway, who heads up the company's successful voice self-service practice, was delighted with the program's conclusion. "We often hear of consumer programs criticizing the use of automated telephony," he said, "but this time The One Show actually put speech recognition to the test, and clearly showed just how well voice self-service applications can work in practice, irrespective of regional accents.

"What was interesting was that demonstrations of the National Rail Enquiries Train Tracker service showed that the only problems with the solution happened when users failed to answer specific questions as expected," he continued. "At Sabio, we've always seen designing for usability as key to ensuring that our applications are intuitive, and therefore suffer less from these kind of issues. All of our applications are designed and developed around our mature user-centric design process that focuses on the callers and their objectives. The design is repeatedly evaluated to ensure we meet our usability objectives."

With a regular audience of some 4.4 million viewers, The One Show "is obviously influential, so we welcome any program that demonstrates how the latest voice self-service solutions are removing barriers to service," he added. "One area which could have been improved was the sector on biometrics, where it was implied that this was an exciting technology of the future. Sabio feels that is not the case. We are convinced that the technology is now mature and is key to solving today's challenge of providing increased financial protection, without restricting access to services. Biometrics can be used to reduce the reliance on passwords and PINs, while still protecting your data.

"Applications such as this clearly show that the latest speech technologies have an important role to play for today's customer service operations, providing they don't impact customer accessibility or usability. Let's hope that 'The One Show' has helped to convince more of us to give self-service a try, as these applications are clearly here to stay," Galloway said.

About Sabio:
Sabio is an innovative U.K. contact center services company focused on delivering exceptional customer contact strategies and solutions. Sabio offers business consulting, systems integration and managed services and has worked with many major organizations across the UK including egg, HCL Technologies, HomeServe, ING Lease, Leeds City Council, Newport City Council, Pitney Bowes, Scottish Widows, Student Loans, Thames Water and Yorkshire Building Society. Sabio has designed and implemented many of the United Kingdom's largest speech applications, and is recognized as a strong voice self-service partner for organizations looking to implement speech-based solutions to help automate their complex, high volume business processes.

For more information, please contact:

Leigh Hopwood
Head of Marketing
Sabio
Tel: + 44 844 412 3000
lhopwood@sabio.co.uk

Cheryl Billson
Sabio PR Team 
Tel: + 44 7791 720460
cheryl.billson@commacomms.com

www.sabio.co.uk/the-one-show.html