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Feb 2005
Speech technology market: Hanging up on growth?
The 451 Group believes the speech technology market is at a key turning point, where fundamental changes – both in terms of the value proposition and the horizontal technology stack – must occur in the marketplace if future growth is to be supported.
The speech technology market, a subset of the interactive voice response (IVR) market, has yet to really 'take off' as a growth area, despite much hype over the past five years. Vendors have in the past attempted to spur growth through two areas of emphasis – open frameworks and 'off-the-shelf' platforms and components (although these efforts have never yielded the growth promised).
The 451 Group believes that for the speech technology market to find real future growth, its fundamental dynamics must change once and for all; moreover, 451 analysts have constructed and analyzed three scenarios through which this growth can (and may) occur.
This 451 Special Report focuses on the competitive opportunities and challenges for vendor companies within the speech technology market – analyzed through these three possible scenarios. It also takes the important step of classifying the competitive environment for speech technology vendors – which is a somewhat complex task. The market is structurally messy, making the creation of a coherent market taxonomy difficult. Vendors straddle multiple niches, and the market is characterized by the tremendous amount of labor-intensive custom work that vendors carry out for individual customers. Even those companies and subsectors that appear on the surface as if they should be selling 'off-the-shelf solutions' are often providing highly customized (and subsequently high-cost) implementations. Thus, a key area of emphasis in this report is the construction of a market taxonomy, and vendors have been classified according to both their positions in the technology stack and their positions with respect to the broader enterprise IT market. Finally, the report provides an analysis of gaps in the offerings of current market leaders, identifies market opportunities that should direct future product development and vendor competition, and provides a detailed account of the subsequent positioning, investment opportunities and marketplace M&A that will ensue.
This report is more than 111 pages in length and was written by Steve Coplan, Sector Head for Networks and Media, with support from Chris Noble and Steve Wallage, both Directors of Research.
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