Why the name?
How did we come up with the name SpeechRep Media, Inc.?
Jim Peake’s marketing career began in the printing and direct mail marketing industry. Later he transitioned to the Internet, then to software and IVR (interactive voice response) speech recognition solutions.
He joined a voice portal company that used speech recognition which enabled the user to call an 800# and ask for sports, traffic, news and a variety of other content. He realized they could not monetize this type of application with just straight advertising, there was no demand and it took a lot of marketing money to get people to the 800#.
Jim’s job within the company was to bring in revenue so, in the early stages of the business, he had to come up with some solutions pretty quickly or else he would be looking for a new line of work. One of the applications the company developed was voice registration for consumer products. This was similar to filling out a product registration card for an item eg. a washing machine but using a telephone instead. The application was successful and is still around today.
Another application they created was a call handling application that they named SpeechRep. This was like a speech/call agent representative. It could capture data on things such as: name, address, phone number and credit card information before the caller was transferred to a live agent. Shortening live agent call times or automating calls was, and still is, highly desirable.
Speech Recognition vs. Voice Recognition: Speech recognition can recognize voices and accents, whereas Voice recognition recognizes one person’s voice only. Voice recognition can easily be tuned in to each individual. Speech recognition is much more complex and requires a large financial investment from a technology development standpoint.
SpeechRep as a product never came to fruition. Jim liked the name and he’d had the domain for SpeechRep since 2001. When he started his consulting business he felt ‘SpeechRep’ described what they offered as a service. SpeechRep Consulting transitioned to SpeechRep Media, Inc. which has now evolved into a strategic management, marketing consulting and media buying agency.
The principal product of SpeechRep Media, Inc. is Direct Response Media/Direct Response Marketing with an emphasis on utilizing the Internet as a platform for testing and tracking, for lower cost than traditional media.