Evaluating commercial speech recognition and DTMF technology for automated telephone banking services

Call-centre based telephone banking has become widespread in the UK, with most high street banks and many building societies offering such services. Advances in small vocabulary connected speech recognition technology and the existence of robust DTMF recognition systems make a strong case for automating such telephone services. This case is reinforced by a financial aspect-the agent cost of human operators. Call centre costs could be drastically reduced if appropriate automated systems could be used in tandem with the more traditional methods of customer service. Any points of customer contact provide 'moments of truth' for a bank, where polite, efficient and effective service must be delivered. If automated services are to be used, it is vital that they achieve this, and that they do not tarnish a bank's image. The OVID project, funded under the EU's ESPRIT programme, aims to investigate the appropriateness of today's speech recognition technology to telephone banking applications. An experiment is described presenting two simulated telephone banking services, with identical dialogues, and differing only in mode of input-speech or DTMF. Subjects' performance with the systems is noted and their attitudes towards them are also objectively assessed via a usability questionnaire. The latter measure especially provides essential data on the acceptability of automated telephone banking services using these technologies.