Speech Recognition a New Technological Innovation

To survive in a cutthroat competition, it is necessary for every company to stay one-step ahead of their competitors using every available technology. Companies have to find out every possible way that can improve service and better customer's experience. Furthermore, to acquire new customers, companies have to hire more employees to meet customers to convince and educate them about the benefits the company may give them. Moreover, companies need to cut operational expenses without sacrificing customer satisfaction.

Speech recognition is such a technology that came into existence after nearly 30 years of research and development. Speech recognition understands the words spoken by the customers and converts them into text that the computer understands.

Just as we recognize a person by his or her appearance and voice, in the same way, speech technology can help devices observe spoken hints from the surroundings. By hearing unobtrusively and consistently, a voice technology can store information into a program, assisting other sensory sources and help make a better image of a situation.

When this technology is incorporated on the phone, any transactions through the phone can be completed up to 40 percent faster than pressing keys and listening various options before reaching their desired option.

It is proved that behind every successful business there is an effective use of technological innovation that enhances employees' productivity and operational efficiency. So speech recognition can be the best investment for every company that aspires to become or stay ahead as high-performance organizations.

A new development in voice recognition technology has allowed the businesses to improve their customer service drastically. Voice recognition software can prove its relevancy in any sector be it medical services, call centers or agriculture. It can be used to increase productivity while reducing unnecessary work burden on the employees.

Especially in call centers instead of engaging employees in answering phone calls and routing them to the relevant customer care executive, the software can handle the task, allowing the employee to be positioned to handle calls that are more complex.
Simple calls can be handled through the system where customers can guide themselves to the answers they need. As speech technology is further integrated with global positioning systems, businesses can track the real location of their field agents.

In its initial days speech recognition technique had many drawbacks such as background noise or if a person having sore throat or in a different accent talked to the system can confuse the system. This would frustrate the customer. Now this technology has become more advanced and can easily recognize hard to understand accents in the way people speak in the different parts of the world.

The higher, long-term potential of speech recognition can be found in its capability to make business more brilliant and of higher value. Utilizing the wide mobile transmission, speech-based mobility solutions can be the best response to the continuous problems of client connections and their fulfillment. With the integration of Voice Biometric can successfully decrease frauds, and increase customers' satisfaction. A voice-based program is therefore the perfect alternative to present methods of using representatives and call centers, boosting their protection and performance to allow ongoing development. Thus, companies can implement this technological innovation without being apprehensive for security or compatibility for personal or professional use.

A speech recognition and Voice Biometrics work on any cell phone, enabling companies to connect with clients any time irrespective of geographic borders, and in any language. The main point here is that this application is really a boon to improve customer satisfaction as well as helping companies to obtaining greater revenue by simply acquiring new clients as well as having current clients.

By Rajendran Sharma

Recruitment Management Software Is The Ideal Foil For The HR Department

Recruiting new employees for your company is a thankless job and is most often handled by the HR department. The department needs to continuously keep a check on the present employees while also keeping a track of the older ones, the prospective ones and many more. No wonder that HR departments are always over burdened. Due to this burden it is but imperative that there might be some mistakes and that only could change the whole demographics of the company. Mistakes by the HR department can turn out to be a whole lot troublesome and therefore utmost care must be taken by the HR while working.

The same goes for recruitment functions too and a small mistake means that you might lose a very good prospective employee without any valid reason. The recruitment procedure is a grueling task and often requires more than one person to properly conduct it. The tasks include collecting all relevant data and storing it, then going through the employee history, etc.

Then again the recruitment procedure also involves interviews which have to be regulated correctly. The interviews are not a very grueling task but it becomes difficult when the HR has to deal with the related paperwork too. Collect information about the candidate, get a background check and many other things are to be done. It is this task that makes a relative simple interview process look humanely impossible.

Above all that there are general tasks for the HR which regulates the procedure of the company and streamline the working. Such a plethora of things to do can be very taxing on a single individual and here in enters the revolutionary Recruitment Management Software.

This unique software could be the shoulder on which the HR department can load all their burdens. The software is designed to carry out the taxing recruitment procedure in a simple and smooth way. It stores all the data, background checks and employee history and allows access to them whenever required. The basic idea behind the software is to streamline the recruitment procedure and to ensure the lack of human error. It also provides all information about a candidate at one place simply by clicking on the mouse. This specific ability gives the HR a definite edge and makes his job easier during the main interview process. The interview process becomes easier for the interviewer if he has all the information at his fingertips.

By Syreus Gupta

The Future of 'Mobile Development' Discussed at the DeveloperWeek 2014 Conference

Mobile devices are here to stay since they help us connect and engage with our family, friends, and business associates while on the move as well as help us educate and gather information on products and companies online.

In the DeveloperWeek 2014 Conference + Event Series, the hot topic of discussion was related to the importance of mobile development. The mobile app development market is not only driven by money although according to the various industry experts, by 2015, there will be around $400 billion additional spending on the mobile market.

Most of the mobile development companies invest a lump sum amount of money to develop something unique and innovative and create new relationships between things, tasks, and locations.

Although to any normal person it may seem the different technologies for mobile including the database, business logic, HTML 5 or JavaScript, app tools, ad networks, and so on would be the same for both web and mobile world. In reality, the mobile developer world is taking enormous advantages of such high-end features including multi-device compatibility, phone-specific actions and events, geo-focused advertising, new mobile development technologies, etc.

Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (mbaas) companies participated at this year's DeveloperWeek with speakers from such well-known companies like Built.io, Kii, Telerik, Sencha, and Parse which is acquired by Facebook.

You can assume mbaas to be the "Heroku for mobile apps". Many of the above mentioned mobile development companies who attended the event let mobile app developers instantly use mobile functionalities such as texting or push notifications or "code once for multiple devices". In other words, mbaas allow mobile developers to do less coding.

The mobile app analytics and app testing industry is found to be growing by leaps and bounds with lots of new companies adding to the list. Mention can be made of companies such as Appurify, Sauce Labs, and Optimizely which provides A/B testing for web as well as mobile app development.

There are also a large number of mobile-only advertisement networks and monetization tools represented at DeveloperWeek 2014 such as the Millennial Media, AppFlood, and Zample to name just a few.

Let's now have a look at the main points discussed in the 2014 DeveloperWeek Conference.

API User Experience is Advantageous

According to the ProgrammableWeb Executive Editor, Mr. David Berlind, mobile developers are expert problem-solvers; thus for them maybe the API user experience is not that important. The mobile application developers are smart enough to scrap data out of an AOI if they need to do so. However, you cannot altogether ignore the fact that if a person gives the developers instant access to a similar data source via an API, all developers will jump to get the same. Industry pioneer such as PayPal's Jason Harmon states we need to focus both on external and internal user experience developer engagement to access and share information in an effective fashion.

Lack of iOS Developers

At the DeveloperWeek Conference, the lack of iOS developers became evident. According to some attendees, not having enough iOS developers is keeping the Native app vs. HTML5 argument still alive.

Lack of Catering Service and Coffee

The 2014 DeveloperWeek did not have proper catering service, and to get coffee, an attendee has to walk at least two blocks from the main event venue. Developer crusader Tony Blank of Context.IO quickly set up a coffee stall at the venue arranging two large containers of prepared Starbucks coffee. He soon found a long queue of developers outside his stall waiting only to learn about his company's API over coffee!

Some other notable mobile app development points discussed at the DeveloperWeek are as follows:

• When releasing an API, you have just one chance to get it right.
• Internet of Things is equal to Internet of APIs.
• No separate sessions were held to debate about security issues covering mobile development and developers.
• Want to encourage developers to know more about your API? Tell them a story.

By Carrie Miller

Best Uses of SMS Marketing

Utilizing text messages to market to your customers directly via their smartphones-the one device that is almost always with them-can be a very effective approach for small businesses. Knowing how and when to do this, however, is critical in order to ensure the full success of such a campaign.

Knowing your audience goes back to marketing basics. The end goal is to know your target audience better than they know themselves. Provide what they needed to have before they had thought of in. It is important to put different SMS mobile marketing strategies into a larger and more meaningful context. Following are some of the best ways in which to utilize the power and benefits of text message marketing to your small business customers:

• At Events
  Depending upon the nature of your event, you have multiple options for how to incorporate SMS marketing. If you are giving a presentation and want to be able to share the file with attendees, simply have them text a code to you and they will receive a reply text with a link to obtain the slides.
  
  You could also send out texts with promotions that are valid only during the event to spur immediate action. If you wish to engage your audience to be more interactive, use text messaging to poll people about different topics-all relevant to the event, of course.


• In Store
  The best time to get people to buy your products is while they are already in your store. Take advantage of text messaging to alert customers about specials that they can enjoy while shopping at that very time. You could even suggest related or accompanying products to encourage the upsell process.


• Anytime Touchpoints
  While certainly the end goal of any overall marketing program is to sell, sometimes there are individual campaigns that are designed to create goodwill or customer loyalty. Text messaging can be leveraged to do this by sending special messages to customers on their birthdays or near select holidays. Including some marketing efforts that are not directly aimed at selling is a smart way to stay in touch with customers without making them feel pestered by you or pressured to buy at every moment.

Texting is easy and extremely inexpensive. This makes testing a campaign with SMS marketing well worth your time. We also believe it will be more than worth your investment and pay many times over for itself when implemented properly.

Edward Kundahl is president and owner of Allentown-based BusinessCreator, Inc., an Internet marketing agency and Web development company that offers clients total search marketing and interactive media solutions. His roots are in small-business search engine optimization and marketing and making sites user friendly and accessible to search engines. He can be reached at ed@businesscreatorplus.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/8412630

Why Apple's IOS8 Operating System Should Excite Users and Developers

Apple's new iOS8 operating system was recently revealed at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco.

While iOS8 may not be a game changer it certainly offers many new features for business use and should excite developers wishing to share and create applications within the new framework.

On the business front, Apple has focused on stronger security. Data protection will be expanded to more applications to enable finer control over such items as mail encryption.

The expanded data protection will include basically all pertinent apps as well as user credentials. These credentials will be protected by a pass code until after a device is unlocked following a reboot.

Apple says it is unleashing a variety of enhanced productivity tools with iOS8. Inbox mail management should be easier as a quick left or right swipe enables a user to mark messages as read or unread or flag them for follow-up.

The new calendar view enables you to see your colleague's availability to schedule a meeting, easing the effort of finding a time convenient for all parties.

Work execution will be easier with iCould Drive. Apple touts you will be able to work on any file anywhere. This will include presentations, PDFs, images and more. This will work right from the iCloud on any device you use, whether it's a MAC or PC.

Need access to corporate documents? Third party document apps can be used to access corporate file servers so you can get to the document you need right from the app you want to edit it in. Apple promises you will be able to transfer files to and from a MAC device even without an Internet connection.

Enhanced connectivity should be a great benefit. Apple says users will be able to start an email on one device and seamlessly continue it on another. iPhone users will be able to answer phone calls on their MAC or iPAD and send SMS messages from any of them.

Those who use photos will enjoy the ability to edit and organize every photo one takes on all your devices though the iCould photo library.

Messaging too will have new features. You can add your own voice into a text message and send a video of what you see as you are seeing it.

Should you wish to workout with colleagues, the health and fitness apps will utilize an easy to read dashboard to share communication with friends, your trainer and even your doctor.

"Spotlight" will serve as a type of answer search engine. It will provide information from Wikipedia and offer trending news and more.

IT departments will have better data and device management tools. iOS8 has more ways to manage information securely without burdening employees with complex rules and work personas. IT staff can now push iBooks, ePub and PDF documents automatically to user devices using mobile device management, MDM, tools. Users should have access to what they need when they need it.

These new tools will give developers deeper access and even more to work with. This will include new keyboard options and still more ways to share content.

Developers will find the ability to create and utilize apps that communicate with other an exciting enticement as Apple pushes the boundaries with this new innovation.

By Marc Arbesman

Scrum Transformation: How Transparency Is Offered

I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine over "transparency" and the effect of Social Media. It amazes me how the new generation so easily communicate their day to day activities and how they feel with no fear. With the help of technology they are a generation of openness.

Yet organizations have not caught on to this. To transition to scrum you need a dedication and commitment to transparency. It is not only one of the five scrum values, it is crucial to the success of any transformation. With openness there is trust. Without trust your project is doomed to chaos and potentially fail. In scrum, transparency is offered through the scrum ceremonies. Let's walk through these.

Sprint Planning:

In sprint planning the team and product owner work together in determining what work will get pulled into the sprint. The team should openly communicate when a story is too large or not ready to pull into the sprint. Design approach is established, tasks are openly defined. The team communicates what they plan to deliver. They also communicate what criteria defines done for them.

Daily Stand Up:

The stand up is yet another opportunity for transparency. It is all about sharing information and identifying dependencies. The team should discuss how and what they plan on doing that day. This is all about communicating the plan of the day and what blockers or impediments the team has crossed. The power of the stand up is often under estimated. Many new teams feel it is unnecessary, not really understanding the value it offers.

Demo (Review):

The demo is held at the end of each sprint and facilitated by the product owner or scrum master. It is all about showing the product owner, stakeholders, and or sponsors the work that was completed. The team shares the work that was committed, the challenges over come and listens for feed back. Sponsors, stakeholders, and or product owners provide open feed back to the team. It is important to understand this ceremony is an exchange, and not an opportunity to thrash the team or hide behind requirements. It should have a cooperative and friendly feel.

Retrospective:

The retrospective is an opportunity for the team to openly discuss what went wrong, and how they can improve. It is a tool to review and improve the dynamics and processes of the team. This is another ceremony not used properly and sometimes not performed. If used correctly it should motivate and help solidify the team.

By Leonor Urena

Understanding Shopify and How to Get the Most of It

Starting a small business is one of the best things that you can always do. Being an entrepreneur requires one to always think outside the box and come with solutions that are really good. Entrepreneurship is a very dynamic process that changes rapidly. For instance, starting good business years ago is very different from starting a business today. The biggest factor that has challenged this process is that of technology. Today, for a business to do really well, it is very important for the entrepreneur to think of the best way to incorporate technology into it. Failure to do this will lead the business being outdone by the vicious competitors. Therefore, this article explains a few details about Shopify and how to get the most out of it.

Shopify is a dynamic web application that allows a person to come up with a good web store that he can sell anything imaginable, from goods to services. For one to effectively use Shopify, there is no need to be technical but a lot of interest in trying to discover new things. The good thing is that you do not need to shut down your brick and mortar business model to incorporate Shopify and e-commerce into it. You can still decide to use the two models and creates a better company.

There are many advantages for using Shopify for e-commerce. One, using Shopify for e-commerce is cheap and affordable. Any business can afford to get the services of Shopify. This is simply because the charges go from less than $40 per month . As such, anyone can afford this service. You should note that in the past, e-commerce website designs used to cost a lot of money such that many entrepreneurs were locked out of the industry. Secondly, using Shopify is very easy. All you need is to create an account, get a theme and place in your items. The shopping cart has been designed and all you will have to do is to put your specific details for payment. In addition, thousands of e-commerce stores are now using Shopify as their base platform. The ratings from these firms are very impressive.

To implement a good Shopify strategy, it is very important for one to get a good designer who has been in the industry for a long time. The benefit of this is that when you have an expert, various things are bound to happen. For instance with a good Shopify web designer you will be at a better chance to get a custom designed theme which goes in line with your company's theme. In addition, when you have a good Shopify designer, search engine optimization will be enhanced. As such, it will be very possible for you to rank very high in the search engines. This will have two important benefits to your company. One, you will increase the margins of the business by reducing the cost of marketing. You will also be available to many people without any payment. This will reduce the customer acquisition cost.

By Annie Mishra