APAC voice business revenues to quadruple by 2008

Despite voice solutions are gaining traction across the Asia-Pacific region, India seems to be on a slow-growth curve, reveals the London-based Datamonitor.

By far the most voice-mature market remains Australia / New Zealand, where innovation in solutions has been on a par with North America. Not only have traditional verticals such as telcos and financial services adopted voice, but innovative deployments for pizza stands, taxi companies and betting shops have also been developed.

As well, the public sector looks set to continue using voice as a means of providing information to taxpayers. Datamonitor expects the voice business market in Australia / New Zealand to more than quadruple from US$20 million in 2003 to US$95 million in 2008.

Over fourteen-fold growth expected for China
Japan and China also look poised to use voice solutions in the areas of financial services and telcos. Japan is now recovering from a prolonged recession, and has a long legacy of speech solution use with embedded devices. China, which is undergoing both economic growth and prolonged deregulation, is also set to adopt voice as a means of self-service.

However, vendors need to take into account the difficulties of supporting local dialects that come from Mandarin and Cantonese, which may mean considerable development costs. However, with a population of over one billion, such an investment could pay considerable dividends. Datamonitor predicts China's voice business market will grow more than fourteen-fold from $16.1 million in 2003 to $237 million in 2008,

Growth unlikely from India
One market where strong growth appears unlikely is India. Similar to South Africa and Eastern Europe, India's adoption of telephony and Internet penetration is relatively small, meaning a limited self-service culture. As well, the Indian domestic consumer population is small enough not to warrant large-scale voice deployments.

Says Datamonitor analyst, Peter Ryan, "Voice vendors are finding APAC an increasingly competitive market. Not only are voice solutions still selling in Australia / New Zealand, but they are also gaining traction in Japan and China, as those countries continue developing a culture of self-service. The key in each of these markets is a good local presence. Without one, vendors will find tremendous difficulty in marketing their solutions."

UK, Italy and Spain are good prospects in EMEA
In EMEA, uptake in voice solutions in the UK ranks ahead of Germany, Eastern Europe and South Africa. According to Datamonitor, voice revenues in the UK will more than double from an estimated US$90 million at the end of 2004 to US$260 million by 2008.

Spain and Italy are likewise good markets for voice vendors in EMEA. Both have high mobile telephone penetration, and are becoming accustomed to using such devices as their primary technology interface. Mobile telcos are rapidly adopting voice solutions to offer value-added services, while the public sector are examining uses for information provision and augmented security.

"Given the large population and commercial enterprise base, as well as the use of English as the primary language, the prospects for voice vendors in the UK market are good. In addition, the UK has a strong self-service culture due in part to early development of speech applications, as well as high Internet and mobile telephony penetration," concludes Mr Ryan.

The report, concentrates uniquely on the EMEA and APAC voice markets. It sizes the voice business revenues across the two regions and in 13 geographic regions. Vertical markets are discussed, as well as competitive issues, including localisation economic markets and self-service culture. Strategic recommendations are provided to help guide outsourcing investors in where to best target market development investment, and how to beat the competition.