Railroad Looks To Speech Technology To Cut Costs

Union Pacific Railroad is investing $500,000 in automated speech-recognition technology to cut call-center costs. The company receives more than 22,000 calls per month from customers requesting the pickup of rail cars after they've been emptied. After three months of using an automated speech system from SpeechWorks International Inc., the company has cut about 30% of these routine requests made to call-center representatives.

Union Pacific has about 1,000 customers enrolled in the speech system, says Paul McGee, senior systems engineering manager. "We've seen a reduction in expenses to the company from fewer people using the 800 service," he says. He did not reveal how much has been saved.

Because customers have welcomed the company's initial use of speech technology, McGee says Union Pacific plans to begin using two more speech-technology applications from SpeechWorks. By the end of January, it will begin testing a voice-authentication application that lets truck drivers bypass call-center reps by using a preregistered voice print to recite an intermodal number that gives them access to products they must pick up. Today, truck drivers must call customer-service reps to identify themselves and recite an alpha and numeric pickup number. "We're planning to do it via voice because the alpha and numeric combo is hard to key in on a touch tone pad," McGee says.

Union Pacific is also looking at a speech-recognition password reset application, which uses voice print authentication to "eliminate the 20-questions game" employees play with help-desk operators when they need to reset a password, McGee says. This application should be available in the second quarter of this year.

Meta Group analyst Earl Perkins says speech recognition is gaining ground, but voice authentication still has a ways to go in terms of reliability. Voice authentication works only if you can control the environment the customer calls from, he says, because environmental noise, cell phone static, or even a stuffy nose distorts speech and interferes with the authentication process.