Roger Huffadine

Worcester UK

Retired IT director [FTSE100 subsidary] now helping to support IT in a High School

Thanks 'Anonymous' you saved me a whole lot of typing by saying most of what I would have. I can only add that 15 years ago when we were working on standardising the interconnection of computers and Call Centre switches the small group of 'experts' identified the the dichotomy between 'people skilled' agents and 'screen reader' agents. The problem is that if speaker independent speech recognition ever becomes a reliable reality the call centre's who employ 'screen reader' agents merely have to connect two bits of equipment together before sacking the agents, whilst the soft skilled call centre will need to capture the knowledge of it's skilled agents and program them into a computer before the agents can be sacked. The 'screen reader' call centre will have at least 12 months advantage over the 'soft skilled' call centre and will have a huge advantage.