Real-time speech enhancement in contact centers: a 2026 field study
Overview
This whitepaper summarizes a year of field measurements deploying real-time speech enhancement across live banking and insurance queues, and the methodology we used to evaluate it.
The evaluation pipeline places enhancement in front of transcription and measures word error rate end to end.
We optimized against end-to-end word error rate, not isolated signal-to-noise ratio.
Judging enhancement by what it enables — accurate transcription, routing, and scoring — rather than by how it sounds produced markedly different design choices under a strict latency budget.
Under a 20-millisecond budget on live calls, the architectures that top offline benchmarks are simply unavailable.
Conclusion
The results support judging speech enhancement by downstream task accuracy, and deploying it as a streaming stage rather than an offline pre-processing step.