Microsoft Just Raised the Bar

While insurance has been steadily improving communications with customers through gradual adoption of chatbots, Microsoft just put another big item on the industry’s technology to-do list: speech recognition.

Microsoft’s announcement on Monday that it is buying speech-recognition firm Nuance for $16 billion means that insurers will have to confront the technology — likely sooner than they had expected. Big Tech has already been getting consumers accustomed to having their speech understood by devices, mostly via Siri and Alexa, and the Microsoft purchase of Nuance will push speech recognition into many business transactions. All industries, including insurance, will have to react as Big Tech again raises the bar for what constitutes a reasonable customer experience.

So, it’s worth spending a minute thinking about what speech recognition will — and won’t — change in insurance... continue reading >