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Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft CEO Summit 2004
Redmond, Washington
May 20, 2004
Another Holy Grail “speech recognition”, bringing this into the systems. And the fact is that this year we finally got the quality up and the ease of building these voice Web sites up that we put out our Speech Server product and now say literally everybody who does a Web site should do this.
And so to give you an example of that I'd like to ask Kevin Shaughnessy to come out and talk about where speech is coming in, in a way that I think will be pretty surprising. Welcome.
KEVIN SHAUGHNESSY: Thanks, Bill.
Good morning. Today, Web technologies do provide great benefits for enterprises by providing self-service applications and solutions for customers and employees around the world. For example, this application is a typical Web application, and it's a Web portal for the fictitious Grand Deluxe Hotel. And, using this application, I can go ahead and book a hotel room by quickly searching for a room in, say, Chicago, Illinois. And I'll go ahead and check in tomorrow and that will be for three nights and so with a checkout day of May 24th.

I can see there are three room types available. I'll choose the lower cost economy single room, being the good corporate citizen, and I'll go ahead and log in here as our demo persona Joe Lucas. We'll use his stored profile information to book this room. And we're done, the room's been booked and a confirmation has been sent to Joe's e-mail address.

Now, this is just one example of an automated self-service Web application, and we're all familiar with these types of applications and certainly all of you have already deployed something similar in your companies.

Now, these types of applications have significantly reduced the number of customer phone calls, the expensive and routine phone calls coming into company contact centers, but yet companies still receive millions of phone calls per year with thousands of call center agents still handling routine transactions and common questions.

With Microsoft Speech Server, you can further reduce your costs in the call center by automating these transactions using speech.

Now, an automated speech system typically will deliver a return on investment of over 1,000 percent, with a payback period of between six to nine months. And adding speech to your contact center will allow your customers to now have new options to gain access to the same Web application and information even when they don't have access to the Internet. They can now use one of the other 2.8 billion telephones that are in existence. And this, in turn, will also allow your call center agents to become more productive by allowing them to focus on high-value transactions and high-touch customer service.


Now, this ability to add speech to Web-based mobile device solutions allows me to create unified and integrated applications that are now available on the Web site, from the telephone and even from mobile devices.

And just as companies like GMAC, Rite-Aid and Talbot's have already implemented these types of integrated solutions using Speech Server, consider how your company might be able to take advantage of these technologies to take that next step and further reduce call center costs potentially by millions of dollars to further increase employee productivity and to further enhance customer satisfaction.

If you have any questions about Speech Server or would like more information, we do have a table that's over in the lobby and please drop by. We'd be happy to assist you. Thank you. (Applause.)

BILL GATES: Thanks, Kevin.

One Voice Technologies Inc. (BB: ONEV)
http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2004/05-20CEOSummit.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/winhec/partner.asp