Cyara is announcing 2 notable changes in the technology dependencies of the Cyara Platform:

1. Speech Recognition Technology – We are completing the transition of all customers to use a newer Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR) engine.
2. Text to Speech Technology – We are completing the transition of all customers to use a newer Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine.

Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR) Migration

What is changing?

All Cyara-hosted customers will be migrated to the new ASR next generation recognition engine.

Why is this change happening?  

Nuance has ended their formal support for their legacy speech recognizer. A number of Cyara customers have adopted the new ASR over the last few years and have reported results as being more consistent and accurate than the legacy ASR.

What do I need to do to upgrade?

All new Cyara-hosted customers, starting with Cyara 7.1, have been deployed with the new ASR engine. Previously-existing customers have been given an opportunity to upgrade selectively.  All customers who have not migrated will soon be migrated to the new ASR engine according to the Cyara Cloud Operations maintenance schedule.

For customers running the Cyara Platform on-premises, and utilizing the legacy ASR engine, Cyara Professional Services can assist with converting your Nuance licenses, and upgrading your Cyara Platform.

After the migration, you may want to consider updating confidence thresholds for Satisfactory and Successful results in Cyara MPSR (Multi-Pass Speech Recognition) Test Case Steps. We have seen that the actual values of recognition confidence provided by the new ASR engine are different, but more consistent from call to call.  Overall, recognition pass thresholds should be raised, as we have seen matches and near-matches to be much closer to 100% (e.g., 90%+) compared with before (e.g., 80%+) and non-matches are often much lower.

What if the new ASR engine doesn’t perform well for me?

After your Account’s cut-over date, if you have difficulties that you are unable to resolve through tweaking of test case step parameters, please contact Cyara Technical Support at https://support.cyara.com

I’m concerned about the uncertain amount of tuning I might have to do. Can Cyara help me assess the impact on my Test Cases?

Cyara can conduct an after-hours regression test of one or more Campaigns (designated by you) if you have a week or more before your migration effort begins. If you need assistance please contact Cyara Technical Support https://support.cyara.com

Text To Speech (TTS) Migration

What is changing?

Cyara  is replacing Nuance RealSpeak 4.x with the next generation Text-To-Speech Engine. As part of this upgrade, a set of TTS voices has been replaced with better options and will be no longer available.

Which TTS Voices will no longer be available?

Note: None of these TTS Voices are in use in Cyara