ITECH 1100: Understanding the Digital Revolution - Speech Report

This report examines the impact of speech recognition technology on the timber industry, focusing on its role in customer support and process improvement. It explores the potential of speech recognition systems to enhance interactions with customers, streamline order processes, and improve data security. The report includes an analysis of the current 'As-Is' processes and proposes a 'To-Be' model incorporating speech recognition, highlighting the benefits of automated customer service and efficient query resolution. The report also discusses the ethical and regulatory considerations surrounding the use of speech recognition, referencing Lawrence Lessig's framework and emphasizing the importance of responsible technology implementation. The report concludes with references to relevant academic sources.

Running head: ITECH 1100 UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION
ITECH 1100 UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION
Name of student
Name of university
Author’s note:

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ITECH 1100 UNDERSTANDING THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION
Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................2
Role of speech recognition in timber industry...............................................................2
Regulation and ethics.....................................................................................................4
Brief use case.................................................................................................................4
Description of As-Is process..........................................................................................6
Description of To-Be process.........................................................................................7
References......................................................................................................................9

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Introduction
Timber could be described as the kind of wood that is mainly processed in making
several planks as well as the beams (Jackson 2019). Timber industry refers to the industry
that deals with the production of several production from timber. In the modern times, timber
industry plays a dominating role in the production of beams as well as planks that are used
for making furniture as well as building houses (Ryan 2016). The considered technology that
could impact the timber industry is speech recognition. Basically, speech recognition could
be described as the ability of any machine or any program of identifying the phrases as well
as words in any spoken language, then efficiently convert them to machine readable format.
The voice of any person is recorded using microphone and then this voice is converted into
signal by the hardware into digital audio from analog sound (Amodei et al. 2016). The
software of the system then processes the audio data that effectively interprets the sound as
any individual words. This ability allows the machine to effectively respond to the spoken
commands that are provided to the system (Yu and Deng 2016). Speech recognition allows
the hands-free control of the various equipment as well as devices, offers effective input to
the automatic translation, as well as produces dictation that is print ready. The most common
use of this technology is in querying databases where it is used for providing queries to the
databases and for providing commands to the computer based systems (Bahdanau et al.
2016).
Role of speech recognition in timber industry
In the timber industry, it has been observed that the customers as well as the clients
might not decide to speak to any live operator (Page et al. 2016). Because of this, the speech
recognition systems could be used for making effective interaction among the clients as well
as the customers. It would help in ensuring the efficient processes as well as improvement on

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the time that is spent in waiting. The orders from any customer could be taken by the
companies using speech recognition. The demands of the customers could be efficiently
taken by the software and any specifications in the woods required could be taken by the
speech recognition software and it could eliminate the requirement of placing any order
gaining department in the organisations.
The companies working in the timber industry are presently facing with the issue of
data theft and the loss of sensitive data from their database. The malicious users or any
person impersonates as the employee of that company and gains access to the data that has
been stored in the database of the organisations. With the introduction of automated
identification, the sensitive as well as risky personal information could be efficiently secured
as the speech recognition systems in the organisations would authenticate any employee after
validating the voice of the employees.
It has also been observed that the customers care services of this industry are facing
significant issues because of the various kinds of demands whose solution could be provided
by the specialists only. The companies are not able to understand the demands of the
customers and they are not able to provide accurate solutions. With the introduction of speech
recognition in this industry, the communication among the service providers could be
significantly improved as the providers of customer case utilises the speech recognition for
serving the clients who might desire any kind of customer care services. It could comprise of
various kinds of questions by the speech recognition system for establishing the demands of
the callers as well as directing them to most suitable operator for required assistance.
The aspect that has been considered for this assignment is providing customer support
to the customers by the customer support department and the improvement that is to be
implemented is providing all the required support using the speech recognition system.

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Regulation and ethics
According to the Lawrence Lessig’s regulations, the regulating behaviour has been
divided into four efficient categories that includes the norms, law, architecture and the market
(Cohen and Sundararajan 2015). From these categories, it could be observed that Law mainly
refers to the aspect that law must be maintained at all times, and it establishes the boundaries
of using any application. In this aspect of speech recognition systems in the timber industry,
the software of the organisation could be used by the malicious users for impersonating any
client and execute malicious tasks. The law of using this system states that the technology
should not be used for causing any harm to the customers or the clients. And if the companies
violates this law, they would be punished. The second aspect of the regulation states that is
norms states could be applied for this technology by ensuring that the people would reject the
company if it has been discovered that the voice data of the customer is being misused by the
company. If the organisation does use the technology for providing benefits to the customers,
then the company could be rejected by the customers. The market forces of this regulation
could be applied for the implementation of speech recognition in the timber industry by
ensuring that the company is liable to pay the compensation for any loss of the customers.
The architecture aspect of this regulation states the use of this technology should be done
after implementing robust architecture of the technology in the companies.
Brief use case
Use Case Name: Provide support to customers
Scenario: Customer support department provides support to customers
Triggering Event: Customer calls company for placing any query
Brief Description: Customer has ordered any product from the companies working in the
timber industry and now wants support for any query regarding the

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product.
Actors: Customer support department
Stakeholders: Customers, manager, customer support department
Preconditions: Customers must have placed an order in the company
Post conditions: Query has been resolved
Exception Conditions:
Query is not resolved as customer support department is not able to
understand the query
Description of As-Is process
Figure 1: As-Is process model of companies in Timber industry

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Source: (Created by author)
In this above image, the query solving of the customers by the company has been
illustrated using process models. From the above image, it could be observed that the
customer places a query in the company and the query is placed by the customer support
department when they have understood the query efficiently. If the query has been solved by
the customer support then the query is closed and if required then the query is forwarded to
the specialists.
Description of To-Be process
Figure 2: To-Be process model of companies in Timber industry
Source: (Created by author)

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In the above image, the query solving process of the companies in Timber industry
has been illustrated using process models. When speech recognition is placed in the As-Is
model of the companies, the queries are effectively placed and it is ensured that the queries of
the customers are solved effectively. The speech recognition verifies the customers and then
provides the option to the customers to spell out their queries in the system and then the
orders are placed. If it is required that the queries could be solved by the specialists, then the
queries are forwarded to the specialists by the customers support. When the queries have
been solved, a report is provided to the manager that provides a summary of all the queries of
the customers regarding the offered products by the company.

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References
Amodei, D., Ananthanarayanan, S., Anubhai, R., Bai, J., Battenberg, E., Case, C., Casper, J.,
Catanzaro, B., Cheng, Q., Chen, G. and Chen, J., 2016, June. Deep speech 2: End-to-end
speech recognition in english and mandarin. In International conference on machine
learning (pp. 173-182).
Bahdanau, D., Chorowski, J., Serdyuk, D., Brakel, P. and Bengio, Y., 2016, March. End-to-
end attention-based large vocabulary speech recognition. In 2016 IEEE international
conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing (ICASSP) (pp. 4945-4949). IEEE.
Cohen, M. and Sundararajan, A., 2015. Self-regulation and innovation in the peer-to-peer
sharing economy. U. Chi. L. Rev. Dialogue, 82, p.116.
Jackson, D.H., 2019. The microeconomics of the timber industry. Routledge.
Page, T., Lata, A., Jeffrey, G., Yelu, W., Rollinson, S., Howcroft, N., Kulang, S., Waldi, D.,
Zamang, L., Rabbi, J. and Vinarut, I., 2016. Development of a PNG timber industry based on
community-based planted forests: design and implementation of a national germplasm
delivery system.
Ryan, S., 2016. Innovation is the only answer left for the Queensland Hardwood Timber
Industry. Australian Forest Grower, 39, p.42.
Yu, D. and Deng, L., 2016. AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION. Springer london
limited.