Assessment technology provider Mercer-Mettl, a company that primarily delivers talent assessment and remote proctoring solutions for the local business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, has officially launched SpeechX – the company’s newest English proficiency test software tool powered by artificial intelligence.
To showcase all the capabilities of SpeechX, Mercer-Mettl hosted a physical event with its clients where Mercer chief revenue officer Anirban Barman Roy mentioned that the product is trying to address the existence of subjective bias in traditional recruitment processes, a common scenario that usually results in time durations which are not standardized.
With SpeechX simplifying communication skills assessments to a duration of 20-30 minutes, Roy says that businesses will be able to significantly cut down on the overall turnaround time in a bias-free manner, as well as gain the ability to scale efficiently especially in the BPO and IT-BPM industry where mass recruitment drives are present.
“The overall accuracy of the tool, the way it responds to inputs, is much better than what we have seen in our competition. There is a lot of initial customer feedback that tells us that we are doing much better than competitors. In fact, we have replaced some of these competition in large BPO settings in India already and we hope to do the same in the Philippines,” he added.
Traditionally, BPO companies utilize voice and accent assessors who are trained on the ‘Common European Framework of Reference for Languages’ (CEFR) and evaluate an applicant’s language discrepancies which either fall into trainable or non-trainable error categories.
“The interface is very clean, we have focused very much on keeping the candidate experience really good so they don’t struggle with the way the questions are posed,” he said.
This legacy process, however, has two distinct flaws: large scale hiring poses resource-intensive and time-consuming issues, and human-led methods lack consistency due to varied understanding and preferences of assessors. SpeechX simulates the process by gauging four parameters: pronunciation, grammar, fluency, and listening skills.
“By leveraging the power of machine learning and data, SpeechX is an example of how technology can be used to cater to the specific hiring needs of the industry. We are delighted to offer this solution to clients to make their recruiting faster and more effective, and to ensure that they hire the right talent consistently,” Mercer Philippines CEO Teng Alday said in a statement.
To counter impersonation and fraud, SpeechX features an AI-based video monitoring solution that automatically generates cheating flags, while its Carnegie Speech-patented ‘Speech Recognition Engine and Pinpointing Technology’ paired with proprietary voice analytics ensures a higher degree of accuracy.
When using SpeechX, companies will receive a comprehensive report on each applicant which can be accessed in real-time. These businesses will also be able to select the difficulty level of the exam, combine multiple skills assessments in one go, and even add their own questions for a more customized screening process.
