Tony Lorentzen at Nuance explores how leading telecommunications providers around the world are using speech recognition to give their customers seamless, intuitive entertainment experiences using just their voices with Dragon TV.
In all its various forms, the PayTV industry is certainly booming; there are countless paid streaming services, premium channels, and paid content options available for viewers to choose from.
And after a year in which many of us spent more time in our homes and front of our screens than we expected to, viewership has been higher than ever as TV remains an ever-reliable source of information and entertainment.
But with all that variety and competition out there, finding the right thing to watch can be overwhelming. So, how can telecommunications providers differentiate their offerings, provide superior experiences, and make exploring relevant content easy and meaningful?
Dragon TV: Voice-Powered Search and Discovery
An Emmy award-winning way for viewers to narrow down the vast amounts of content and find what they really want to enjoy, Dragon TV uses natural language understanding (NLU) to add voice searches and commands to customers’ smart TV experiences. It can integrate into remotes, set-top boxes, smart speakers, and even the TV itself.
Powered by a speech recognition engine, Dragon TV offers two main sets of capabilities: Command and Control, and Content Search Classification. Through Command and Control, viewers flick between channels, access the on-screen TV guide, bring up subtitles, navigate their recorded content, and more.
Content Search Classification, on the other hand, identifies your customers’ speech as a search request, breaks it down into a simple query, and passes that on to the provider’s own search engine or third-party content discovery platform, like Rovi or ThinkAnalytics, for a deep content search.
In short, customers speak, and Dragon TV turns that into digital interactions that make their lives easier. And it makes their loyalty stronger too—because who doesn’t love a service that provides simple experiences, especially if it means they don’t have to type out lengthy movie titles using their remote?
Voice Commands That Recognise Who’s in Control
Voice control has become a common functionality over recent years, which means telcos are looking for ways to go beyond the basics and turn voice into a value creator as well as a customer convenience.
Now, Dragon TV can go one step further than commands, using voice biometrics to identify the speaker and personalize responses—perfect for households with a variety of interests. It can determine who’s watching sports and who prefers reality TV, and protects those in the house too young to watch season four of The Handmaid’s Tale.
It uses over 1,000 unique characteristics in the customer’s voice to identify them in seconds. That means customers don’t need to remember the PIN for the parental control settings on their TV, or the password for their user account.
And they don’t have to go digging for their preferred content—they can use a command like “show me my recordings” to access it easily, with Dragon TV automatically recognising their voice and loading up their personal collection of recorded shows and tailored recommendations.
It’s not limited to simple queries either. Dragon TV can do deep searches too, such as “find me Bruce Willis movies from the 1980s”, using extra-detailed metadata to help viewers find specific content quickly and easily.
This control extends even further, helping customers manage their accounts without ever leaving their couch. By integrating with telcos’ customer care systems, Dragon TV can provide voice access to everything from simple FAQs about settings and basic troubleshooting, to in-depth capabilities like signing up for new context packages or paying bills.
Not only does this add an extra self-service channel for viewers, it also helps telcos turn their PayTV offerings into a meaningful two-way communication channel with their customers.
A Popular Tool With Real Value—for Customers and Providers Alike
Far from a tool that customers use a few times and forget about, Dragon TV has proven popular with subscribers, with 70% of those who use it within the first month still navigating and searching with their voice nine months later.
In fact, Dragon TV currently handles more than 1.5 billion interactions every month, with the average user making 100 voice requests each. What’s even more compelling for providers is that 44% of content searches are for premium or paid content, making it a lucrative opportunity to upsell and expand their paid subscriber bases.
Leading Telcos Around the Globe Embrace the Power of Voice
More than 20 TV manufacturers have already jumped on the opportunity to provide voice search and control, access to a wider pool of content options, and a customer-favorite UI experience.
The likes of Liberty Global, Telecentro, Sky, and Orange France have all embraced Dragon TV to offer their customers simple, personalized, and secure voice-enabled entertainment experiences.
And Dragon TV is expanding all the time, enhancing more offerings and reaching new customers. Earlier this year, LG announced that it was opening up its webOS TV platform ecosystem to its brand partners, which includes Dragon TV as a core component.
There’s potentially even more to come from telcos forming partnerships with brands and organisations beyond the telco space. We see a strong opportunity for ecommerce integrations that could help monetize advertisement spaces and product placement more effectively.
Imagine a customer exploring the clothes, lifestyle products, or foods they see in their shows or movies—and the adverts interspersed within them—with the ability to purchase directly from their remote.
Another Channel for Seamless Customer Experiences
In the age of prestige TV and sprawling film franchises, giving customers a simple, user-friendly way to access their preferred content and find new favorites is the key to increasing satisfaction and boosting loyalty.
With Dragon TV, viewers can do just that—and providers can continue to build a complete omnichannel customer experience that spans their whole business.
Author: Guest Author
Published On: 29th Nov 2021
Read more about - Guest Blogs, Nuance
