Speech analytics software is quickly becoming an integral part of the modern call center’s tech stack. And that’s not surprising considering how today’s businesses (or call centers in particular) rely heavily on telephone conversations and voice-based interactions to deliver customer service, drive growth, and enhance customer satisfaction.
However, unearthing insights buried within these conversations isn’t always a walk in the park since it might require a ton of manual work — the kind that today’s business can’t always afford. Here’s where speech analytics software emerges as a crucial solution, paving the way for advanced data analysis with minimal human intervention and regulation.
In this blog, we’ll discuss more about 11 leading speech analytics solutions out there, so that you can fully comprehend how well each would satisfy your requirements. You can then choose the tool that’s ideal for you — and put it to best use to deliver better support and make your customers happy.
Sounds like a plan? Then, let’s dive right in!
What is speech analytics software?
Speech analytics software is an advanced technological solution that uses natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to transcribe audio data into text automatically. Speech analytics solutions are already being extensively adopted into customer service operations worldwide owing to the rapid and precise conversation analytics capabilities it offers.
These tools can extract customer insights (sentiment and intent) and classify interactions — empowering brands to make data-driven decisions. In addition to that, speech analytics can help you drill down to the source of customer issues with extensive root cause analysis (RCA) capabilities — and also help ensure compliance with brand guidelines and industry standards.
Dive Deeper: The A-Z Guide to Speech Analytics
Why to use a speech analytics tool
By harnessing the power of speech analytics, businesses can achieve the following results.
Enhance customer service: Understand customer needs better and provide useful, relevant support.
Utilize real-time analysis for tailored interactions: Stay on track with changing customer needs and consistently deliver personalized, high-quality customer service.
Optimize operational efficiency: Streamline support operations and enhance agent productivity by reducing manual effort related to transcription.
Reinforce quality assurance and compliance: Constantly monitor customer conversations for any non-compliant responses and ensure on-brand experiences.
Gain a competitive edge in the market: Tap into voice-based customer data for previously undiscovered insights and market trends that can help shape your support strategy.
Read More: Importance of Speech Analytics in Call Centers
Types of speech analytics software
Speech analytics solutions are categorized primarily based on their functionalities as follows:
Transcription-based analytics: These tools prioritize the conversion of audio data into precise textual transcripts, serving as the foundation for subsequent analysis. This highly accurate transcription allows for the identification of keywords, sentiment analysis and extraction of other valuable insights.
Real-time analytics solutions: These tools provide immediate analysis of ongoing conversations, offering real-time insights to agents or supervisors during customer interactions. This aids in prompt decision-making and issue resolution, improving customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Hybrid or comprehensive speech analytics: These encompass a combination of functionalities — offering a broader range of features like sentiment analysis, keyword spotting, emotion detection and categorization. Hybrid analytics enables a comprehensive view of interactions, allowing organizations to understand and improve customer interactions at a much deeper level.
11 Best speech analytics software
Finding the ideal speech analytics solution is a pivotal decision if you’re looking to reinvent the way you look at your brand’s spoken interactions. We've prepared a comprehensive list of the best speech analytics software precisely to guide you through this venture.
These tools have been curated with thorough research and complete impartiality to help you make a good decision and unlock valuable insights from your customer conversations. Let's quickly jump to the topic and explore the list to discover the best solution that can address your analytical needs.
⚠️ Important Note for Readers:
The below tools are in no particular order of ranking or popularity. Still, they are independent picks by Sprinklr’s editorial team based on our research and publicly available information in the review sites. It is crucial to note that software or platforms may evolve over time, and the company may address some of these concerns in newer updates or versions.
1. Sprinklr
Sprinklr’s Speech Analytics software serves as a single source of truth for conversational analytics that offers unparalleled precision in transcribing and analyzing spoken interactions in customer service conversations. With 100% call coverage and real-time reporting on call center agent performance metrics, Sprinklr’s industry-leading AI accurately converts support conversations into actionable insights that will help fuel customer engagement — and also help improve your team’s operational efficiency by up to 60%. Highly practical features, seamless integrations and out-of-the-box scalability make Sprinklr an exceptional choice for businesses seeking to harness the power of speech data to power their growth.
🚀 Top features
Real time reporting: Sprinklr gives you real time access to all your customer service and speech analytics data, so there’s no lack of visibility with critical customer service metrics. You can use this data to understand your team’s performance and identify top contact drivers, which can then be used to improve your product and the quality of service you can offer.
Agent quality score and quality management: Drilling down on your agent metrics and seeing their performance across critical customer service metrics is a walk in the park with Sprinklr. Insights into individual data points such as soft/hard skills, product knowledge and performance metrics (average handle time, first contact resolution, customer satisfaction) help you understand your team’s individual and collective strengths. You can then use this data to devise custom learning plans that will help each agent upskill effectively.
Sentiment analysis: Leveraging sentiment analysis capabilities, Sprinklr Service interprets the emotional tone within conversations — providing real-time insights into customer perceptions and enabling proactive engagement strategies. You can use sentiment analysis to also ensure you’re always providing useful responses by monitoring sentiment in real time, and consciously directing your efforts towards delivering satisfying resolutions.
Self-learning AI models: One of the key differentiators in the market, Sprinklr AI models powered by an industry-leading AI engine enable you to improve your AI accuracy without any manual intervention. The system continuously retrains the AI models using gathered customer data, which is then used to improve the accuracy of future responses and suggestions. Sprinklr’s AI models reach accuracy levels of up to 85% over time, which is one of the industry’s best scores in AI accuracy for speech analytics.
Overall verdict
Sprinklr Service outshines as a customer service and speech analytics software due to its exceptional accuracy in transcribing conversations, comprehensive sentiment analysis and reliable keyword identification. The combination of precise data capture and deep emotional insights empowers businesses to elevate customer engagement, tailor strategies, and derive actionable intelligence — making Sprinklr Service a superior choice for effective customer-centric operations and data-driven decision-making.
Did you know: Sprinklr helped Cdiscount, a famous French e-commerce platform, to improve its operational efficiency by 30%? All of that was done by analyzing almost 800K voice calls to the brand over a span of just 8 weeks. That’s the real power of AI-powered speech analytics.
Customer testimonials
💪 Strengths
Sprinklr has a simple interface! Love it! The flow is linear and easy to process. The analytics give us an amazing amount of insight into our productivity and areas of growth. We have the ability to customize features that align with our business needs. There are unique dashboards for every level of user within our organization.
💡 Areas for improvement
Sprinklr's vast features can be advantageous, but some users may find them to be too much for them. Slow loading times and glitches can sometimes be frustrating and disrupt efficient workflow management.
Pricing: Starts from $249 per seat per month (billed annually). Check pricing here.
Trial: 30-day fully functional trial available, no credit card required
2. Genesys Cloud CX
Genesys has been a pioneer in contact center technology, and its speech analytics capabilities on the Cloud CX platform prove to be a strong cloud-based contender in transforming conversations into actionable intelligence. The company’s extensive experience with contact center technology — right from the on-premises infrastructure days to the modern cloud era — helps them to provide a valuable offering on the customer service front, especially with respect to speech analytics. Through advanced transcription and analytics, it deciphers spoken customer interactions to detect sentiments, identify trends and reveal crucial customer insights.
🚀 Top features
Voice transcription
Trendspotting
Topic miner
Sentiment analysis
Overall verdict
Genesys, while a robust tool, might not be the absolute best for speech analytics due to potential limitations in the depth of its sentiment analysis and a poor user experience. Additionally, it has a lot of room for improvement in terms of ongoing support and feature updates. There are also some third-party integrations necessary for unleashing the tool’s full potential, which brings added costs and complexity to your operations.
Customer testimonials
💪 Strengths
Genesys Cloud has revolutionized our ability to service our customers, and the ease in which it's configurable allows us to make changes with little effort and without external parties of developers.
💡 Areas for improvement
WFM, Logging needs to be improved, Compliance like TCPA for outbound communication, More monitoring capabilities if possible.
Pricing: Starts from $75 per user per month
Trial: Available for 30 days
3. Google Cloud’s Speech-to-Text
Speech-to-Text provides powerful natural language processing capabilities through API-based integrations, which can be connected to your primary customer service software or used as a standalone solution. You can then use these transcripts to gain critical insights into your customer conversations. By identifying sentiments, key phrases and contextual nuances within these conversations, businesses can harness highly useful data to enhance customer experiences, optimize operational processes and drive informed strategic decisions.
🚀 Top features
Support for 125 languages and variants
Audio detection and separation on calls with multiple speakers
Speech adaptation
Overall verdict
Google Cloud impresses with its advanced transcription and language processing, making it a strong contender in speech-to-text capabilities. However, compared to dedicated speech analytics platforms focused on customer service, Google Cloud might lack certain specialized features, such as detailed sentiment analysis and ease of integration with other solutions. There seems to be inadequate documentation on deploying the solution as well, which might deter technically challenged users from even trying out the tool.
Customer testimonials
💪 Strengths
Google Speech-to-Text has great functionalities, but the best part is it can add punctuation marks in the text with precise accuracy. it can understand and provide accurate results 99% of the time. its usage is fairly very easy and most of the work is automated. we have implemented it to get better results in our transcription. we integrate with our calling and meeting app to get all the information saved.
💡 Areas for improvement
I have only faced one issue and that is it cannot understand some accents properly primarily Indian and Chinese.
Pricing: Pay-on-the-go model starts from $0.006 per 15 seconds of voice data
Trial: Free, available for 90 days. $300 credit for users to try out all the capabilities
4. Talkdesk
Talkdesk harnesses advanced speech recognition technologies to transcribe and analyze spoken conversations effectively. Its sentiment analysis and trendspotting capabilities provide valuable insights for businesses to refine their customer interactions. With Talkdesk's speech analytics module, customer service teams can identify and cater to specific intents, detect changes in customer sentiment and flag key moments in a conversation, which can help them further enhance the quality of service being delivered.
🚀 Top features
Preview, progressive and predictive dialers
Voice activity detection and voice broadcast in IVR
Intelligent call routing capabilities
Overall verdict
Talkdesk offers a strong foundation for speech analytics with notable features like sentiment analysis and keyword identification. However, user reviews have talked about difficulty with implementation due to the lack of involvement from the pre-sales/implementation teams. The same concern is also applicable to areas like scaling operations and integrating with other platforms.
Another area of concern with Talkdesk is the pricing calculation on the platform, where users have complained about being imposed unnecessary usage fees due to bugs with call tracking and management. This issue can be a dealbreaker since users might be charged for features and minutes they didn’t use, leading to unnecessary frustration and a bad user experience.
Customer testimonials
💪 Strengths
Working with Talkdesk team members to continually grow the product is the best thing about Talkdesk. They truly listen to their customer's wants, needs, and questions. They will often schedule meetings with product teams, IT, or CSMs to have in-depth conversations.
💡 Areas for improvement
IT can often take time to provide detailed updates/resolutions to outstanding tickets. We are aware this is being worked on and are patiently awaiting this aspect to be improved.
Pricing: Starts from $75 per user per month for CX Cloud Essentials (basic plan)
Trial: Free trial available for 30 days
5. Nice CXone
NICE CXone combines omnichannel routing, speech analytics, workforce optimization and automation on an open cloud foundation, which helps transform speech into actionable insights. With advanced algorithms and natural language processing, it transcribes and analyzes customer conversations to uncover patterns in sentiments in customer conversations. This data can then be used to optimize operations, enhance customer experiences and make informed business decisions.
🚀 Top features
Omnichannel care on voice, social and digital platforms
Agent scheduling and assignment
Mobile app
Overall verdict
While NICE offers robust sentiment analysis and precise transcription, it has a bad reputation for putting together these features in a way that results in an unpleasant customer experience. Also, quite a few users have had issues with the workforce management capabilities, where they’ve found it difficult to set up and falling short in terms of what it can actually do to improve your WFM activities.
Customer testimonials
💪 Strengths
The thing I like the most so far about it is its ability to read the tone in a call as well as cut out all the dead airtime automatically. We are just getting familiar with all the new features. However, it's leagues above the last phone system we used. We are about to start using the built-in chat function as well with the bot to help drive calls down. So, what I like best are the rich features we get to make my day-to-day easier.
💡 Areas for improvement
It can get expensive if storing large amounts of call recordings.
Pricing: Flexible plans starting from $71 per user per month (for Digital Agent persona)
Trial: Available for 60 days
6. Observe.ai
Observe.ai proves to be a strong contender in the speech analytics software market today, utilizing live conversation intelligence to boost contact center performance and optimize support operations. Powered by a 30 billion-parameter large language model (LLM), Observe.ai monitors most of your customer interactions and helps drive positive business outcomes with insights to maximize the efficiency of your voice processes.
🚀 Top features
Machine learning and artificial intelligence
Call recording and analysis
Customer scoring
Overall verdict
Even though Observe.ai has been in the market for a while with its speech analytics capabilities, they’re still prone to errors and discrepancies, which makes it a bit unreliable. Also, there are minor bugs in the UI that are heavily affecting the customer experience and making the solution seem very inefficient.
Customer testimonials
💪 Strengths
I like that we can review our calls whenever we need to. One can read along with the call; it is mostly pretty accurate. There may be some missing words here or there, but you have to understand that sometimes the program does not pick up what is being said. The more and more I use it, the more and more I find something helpful that I can use to better my calls.
💡 Areas for improvement
To be honest, although everything was all really good with this app (Observe.AI), the only thing that i would highly recommend is for it to have the callback present on the data as well.
Pricing & Trial information: Available on request
7. Dialpad
Dialpad is a comparatively new but powerful speech analytics tool that also uses AI to simplify voice-related tasks for your support team. Integrating seamlessly with other platforms, Dialpad helps you analyze customer interactions in real time and provide actionable insights while also simplifying the process of delivering great customer service experiences through its unified workspace.
🚀 Top features
IVR and Auto Dialer
Concurrent Calling
Session Summary Notes and Recording
Overall verdict Dialpad serves as good speech analytics software because it is accurate, fast and easy to use. However, it lacks some advanced features offered by competitors that can prove to be differentiators during decision-making — tight integrations and fully automated call management. There are also widespread complaints about calls being dropped on the app, which is a big deal when it comes to contact center solutions.
Customer testimonials
💪 Strengths
I love the coaching tools, and the instant feedback you receive while talking to the customer. it was very easy to use and navigate the system.
💡 Areas for improvement
Sometimes the export feature is a bit wonky. It seems like I have to pull several reports to get metrics rather than being able to see all metrics for one agent to review all areas, including availability over the week and daily stats.
Pricing: Starts from $15 per user per month, billed annually
Trial: Available for 14 days
8. Five9
Five9 is an on-demand cloud-based contact center platform that includes a powerful speech analytics tool. Unlike many other solutions in the market, Five9 has customer experience at the core of its operations, which allows it to deliver significant improvement in contact center performance through detailed analytics. Armed with that data, you can then focus on streamlining processes across the customer service function while not losing focus on improving the quality of service from speech-based interactions.
🚀 Top features
100% recorded call transcription
Automated interaction scoring
AI-based natural language understanding
Sentiment, emotion, and acoustic analysis
Overall verdict
Five9 is decent speech analytics software with accurate transcription, fast analysis and a wide range of features. However, it is more expensive than some competitors and can be complex to set up and configure. Frequently experienced bugs among users related to calls and the user interface don’t help with improving this situation.
Customer testimonials
💪 Strengths
The depth of options and ability to customize Five9 for our purposes is outstanding. We use Five9 for our support reps and it is incredibly scalable and easy to use once you get past the learning curve.
💡 Areas for improvement
The system has a steep learning curve at times. Everything Works fine. It's just the company can be slow at times in responding to requests. That said, they do have fantastic customer resources.
Pricing: Starts from $149 per user per month for voice-only features
Trial: Not available
9. Ozonetel CloudAgent
Ozonetel CloudAgent is an enterprise-grade contact center solution that also offers comprehensive speech analytics solutions for cloud-based contact centers. With an extensive suite of features, including omnichannel capabilities and end-to-end customer service management, CloudAgent enables you to deliver the best voice support your customers love.
🚀 Top features
100% call quality monitoring and supervision
Personalized agent training and coaching
Automated reports on Speaking Rate, Decibel Levels, Call-vs-listen ratio, Participation Ratio and Interruptions
Overall verdict
Ozonetel CloudAgent is a good choice for businesses that are looking for a comprehensive and affordable speech analytics solution, but it is not the best option for businesses that need the most advanced features or an enterprise-level speech analytics solution. Some users also think that the UI is outdated and makes the solution look very old and unorganized.
Customer testimonials
💪 Strengths
Effortless integration and implementation! The primary highlight is their excellent service, especially in training and agent support. We consistently receive prompt responses for any issues related to call connectivity and IVR. The added advantage of accessing detailed stats for both inbound and outbound call recordings has significantly enhanced our operations. Appreciating the efficiency and responsiveness.
💡 Areas for improvement
Sometimes it takes time to upload and needs better bandwidth. The process of adding new user is a little tedious as we need to add the user and the phone number in separate windows and may need to change.
Pricing: Starts from $30 per user per month
Trial: Available
10. Enthu.AI
Enthu.AI is a new AI-based analytics solution on the market that primarily focuses on speech analytics and voice-based interactions. At its core, Enthu is targeted at sales-based contact centers that want to improve their customer experiences and drive more revenue, in turn optimizing voice operations as a whole unit. In addition to speech analytics, this solution also helps monitor prospect-related interactions from other customer service channels, such as live chat and social media.
🚀 Top features
Call recording and analysis
AI solution powered by smart machine learning algorithms
Text generation and summarization capabilities for quicker responses
Overall verdict
Even though customers are all praises for Enthu’s capabilities, this is a new solution in the market and needs to be evaluated carefully and to a greater extent before it can be considered a contender. Also, there is a general opinion that the product is overpriced at the moment, which might deter small businesses from purchasing this solution.
Customer testimonials
💪 Strengths
Enthu stands out with its simplistic yet stylish interface. Making a technical application easy to use for non-technical users whilst providing an empowering and seamless experience. Enthu is rich in its product offerings and features, which are constantly reviewed to ensure the best solutions are available to its users.
💡 Areas for improvement
It still lacks the customer word cloud trends and specific metric coaching points that i have seen in other leading analytic products. I hear that these are features coming in 2024.
Pricing: Starts from $59 per agent per month
Trial: Full trial available only for up to 25 agents, for 14 days
11. Verint
Verint is a global technology company that specializes in customer engagement and workforce optimization solutions. Verint's speech analytics software is part of its suite of customer engagement solutions, which helps organizations analyze spoken interactions between customers and agents — and gather actionable insights on improving customer satisfaction and efficiency.
🚀 Top features
Accurate transcription
Unified visual player
Non-compliance alerts
Overall verdict
While Verint's speech analytics software boasts impressive capabilities, potential drawbacks like insufficient audio processing speeds and a steep learning curve might keep users thinking about whether this would be the right solution for their business. Also, the lack of transparency with pricing and the unavailability of a trial doesn’t really help with increasing the brand’s credibility as a good vendor.
Customer testimonials
💪 Strengths
Using Verint speech analytics has allowed us to mine the call recordings for previously unknown patterns. While using configured keywords and categories to look for anticipated patterns, the speech engine will also highlight anomalies and on a single pane of glass, display information that can be used for a deeper dive. This has allowed us to not only fine-tune our operations but also increase our CX and NPS scores.
💡 Areas for improvement
Speech analytics is an inherently difficult field and accuracy is paramount. Sometimes the speech transcription is not as accurate as desired which may cause the analytics portion to not work as well. As long as this is understood and factored in, mitigating steps can be taken.
Pricing & Trial information: Available on request
How to evaluate the best speech analytics vendor
Before you choose a speech analytics vendor, you need to assess various critical aspects with each vendor to ensure you’re choosing the best option for you and the organization. Here are some of the factors you can consider:
Accuracy: Accuracy is the most basic criterion of discussion when it comes to speech analytics. How well the system can transcribe spoken words into text directly influences the reliability of subsequent analyses. Thoroughly assess the accuracy of the transcription process to guarantee the software can effectively capture and interpret verbal communication (even across different languages if necessary).
How to check it: You can refer the product website for accuracy-related numbers, or even sign up for a trial and evaluate the solution’s accuracy through rigorous monitoring.
Features: Look for strong features that can cater to your specific requirements. Capabilities like sentiment analysis, keyword spotting, language identification, emotion detection and categorization can be considered. Choose a vendor with a rich feature set aligned with your organization's analytical needs.
How to check it: You can check out the features on product collaterals and solutions pages from the vendor website. We’d recommend you directly get in touch with a product specialist from the vendor and explain your needs to enable them to assist you better with the purchase.
Scalability: As your organization grows and evolves, your speech analytics solution must be able to grow with you at the same rate. Scalability is crucial, ensuring that the software can seamlessly handle increased data volumes and adapt to the changing needs of your business. Note that it’s important that the chosen solution can scale up without any compromise in performance or data accuracy.
How to check it: During product evaluation, you can test the solution with simulated high-volume data and verify if the system can handle large amounts of audio data without taking a hit with performance and accuracy.
Integration: A seamless integration process minimizes downtime and ensures a smooth transition to using speech analytics software. Assess how well the software integrates into your existing technology stack — including your customer relationship management (CRM) system, unified customer service solution and other pertinent tools.
How to check it: Most speech analytics products have a dedicated page for integrations on their website, which you can check to see if it has out-of-the-box integrations for all your operation-critical applications. You can also refer to their help documentation for technical information on the integration capabilities.
Cost-effectiveness: Consider all costs involved, such as initial investment, licensing fees, ongoing maintenance costs and any additional expenses associated with customization or integration. Focus on obtaining a cost-effective, budget-friendly solution while delivering substantial ROI through better efficiency and enhanced customer insights.
How to check it: A pre-purchase ROI analysis is the best way to determine if a speech analytics vendor could augment your support operations without putting a dent in your customer service budgets. Also, ensure that you check the pricing models and any hidden/additional charges for unlocking product features so that you’re well aware of the ownership and maintenance costs.
5 Use cases of speech analytics software in 2024
No matter what speech analytics solution you choose, it should cater to a few essential use cases in order for it to yield a reasonable ROI for your business:
Sentiment analysis: Determining the emotional tone or sentiment expressed in conversations is critical to help organizations gauge customer satisfaction, identify potential issues and understand public opinion.
Keyword spotting and identification: This feature enables the identification and tracking of specific words or phrases within conversations — aiding in identifying trends, issues or topics of interest. This is also an essential feature with social listening solutions, which help complement your customer service operations.
Emotion detection: Analyzing vocal cues and tonal variations to detect and categorize emotions expressed during interactions proves important while providing insights into customer feelings and attitudes.
Categorization and classification: Sorting conversations into predefined categories based on criteria like topics, product mentions, or service issues facilitates organized analysis and decision-making.
Trend analysis: Your speech analytics solution needs to analyze data over time to identify patterns, trends and changes in customer behavior. It is also necessary to study market dynamics or operational efficiency, which helps with strategic planning and adaptation.
Final thoughts
In choosing the right speech analytics tool, put your business needs in focus.
Are you looking to deliver a unified customer experience across channels?
Do you need personalized support strategies and actionable insights into customer emotions?
Do you want to truly look beyond just the numbers and understand your customers well to improve the quality of your customer service?
If you’ve answered “yes” to all of these, we have the perfect solution for you — Sprinklr Service.
Our speech analytics capabilities elevate your understanding of customer interactions and change them into insights that you can learn from and improve constantly. Turn conversations into actionable intelligence for transformative customer engagement — embrace Sprinklr today to revolutionize how you listen, analyze and respond to your customers.
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