IDG Contributor Network: Twilio does speech recognition and understanding, the right way

We’ve all had horrendous experiences with voice recognition when calling a support center – I’d like to think that it’s just me with my slightly unusual Kiwi accent, but everyone I talk to has similar stories of getting exasperated at an automated call center that hopelessly gets even the most basic speech recognition exercises wrong. It’s a sad reality of the modern world that organizations try to shoehorn users into solutions that aren’t yet fit for purpose, just to save some costs.

The world of communications has been the focus of Jeff Lawson for the past few years. Lawson is founder and CEO of Twilio, the company that offers a modular communications platform that developers use to power the communication functions of their apps. From tiny startups to huge companies like Uber rely on Twilio to manage all the communication stuff, so that they don’t have to. in a phone conversation prior to Twilio’s annual developer conference, Signal, Lawson told me that ever since the beginnings of Twilio, back when all they did was voice communications, he has hated voice recognition.

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