Market study Thai speech technologies in Thailand

Abstract

Speech technologies, in this study include text-to-speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR), are one emerging technology in Thailand anticipated to be in use in the near future. The National Electronics and Computer Technology Center of Thailand (NECTEC) has developed Thai language speech technology software and looks forward for commercialization. With many possible business opportunities, the market study must be conducted in order to suggest the applications of Thai speech technologies that are viable in market aspect to be commercialized in Thailand’s business environment. The study was based on two main areas: the study of the applications in other countries, and conducting interviews with the potential customers of NECTEC. The study mainly uses the market analysis tools and techniques to analyze the business opportunities. From the study, the current potential market is the call center business. The result is supported by the estimated market worth of the call center software business of 595 million THB (approximately US$ 19 million), which suggests the potential market for speech technologies. Other reasons such as the related nature of the business to speech, successful international call center applications, the growth of the call center business in Thailand, and more, also support the implementation of speech technologies with the call center business. In general, current TTS capability meets the requirements of most customers, but improvement on ASR capability is required. The plan is to apply speech technologies with the existing interactive voice response (IVR) system where general tasks can be taken over by speech technologies to reduce the need of human operators for simple and repetitive tasks. As for the future market, two interesting future markets are the accessibility applications and the mobile applications & e-book readers. It can be suggested that speech technologies have a potential to grow in Thailand’s business environment, and might become one important value-added function for the existing products or services.