As my dad drove us to the airport for our trip to Orlando, I got the bright idea to see how many times in one week I would encounter speech technologies while on vacation. This occurred to me as my some what technophobe father let on that he likes the navigation system in his new car). Frankly, I was intrigued. He doesn’t mind listening to TTS?

On a previous trip to Phoenix, I had a similar idea when I stood there captive in the baggage area, waiting for my bag and listening to multiple repetitive warning messages spoken using TTS. I never did follow up to find out why they use TTS, but I had an inkling that maybe the airport uses it because it’s just different enough from the real thing that people will stop and listen to it. Some day I’ll ask.

Back to Orlando. My sum total of experiences with ASR or TTS in one week – one. I was surprised. We went to four amusement parks and multiple other locations and not once did I encounter speech technologies. Perhaps Disney doesn’t believe in speech.

The one notable exception was the TeleNav navigation application on my husband’s Blackberry, which came in handy numerous times. He had tried out TeleNav, which you can trial for free for a month, and then $9.99 after, and had questioned whether it was worth it compared to Google Maps, which he also uses on his phone. In his opinion, Google Maps provides superior search capabilities, but it gives the user only text directions or visual maps, which can be a real liability if you are driving. With the TeleNav application, we ended up with text, maps, and clear directions spoken in a clear voice. It is definitely worth checking out.

I just finished reading Michelle Goodall Faulkner’s article in CRM Daily, “When Getting Human isn’t Enough," in which she pretty succinctly lays out what she terms the “comprehensive approach to the design and deployment of customer-facing applications in the contact center.” She brings up the downside of self-service applications that lead to caller frustration such as misrouted calls, hang-ups, and other factors such as those tediously long menus that we all suffer through when companies fail to apply best practices to IVR design. Which, I might add, after 20+ years of IVR deployments, there is just no excuse for, but I digress.

The gist of her article however is on testing, and here she lays out the three main components of testing a customer service application – usability testing, automated functional testing (AFT) and load testing. She also references the 10 “standards” for application and design testing detailed in gethuman standard v1.0 on Paul English’s Get Human web site.

I agree with Michelle. Testing is everything and it should be done before deployment, not after you use your customers as guinea pigs.

Here is an update on a startup company in the UK that I’ve been following for a year now, and a few of you may know about. Well worth checking into, VoxIQ provides an enabling technology to the contact center market that combines speech technologies and knowledge databases to assist live agents in providing the best customer service and satisfaction possible - and they do it really fast. The key to VoxIQ’s uniqueness is in the combination of speech recognition and the use of knowledge databases. Many companies use speech recognition or speech analytics to improve agent performance, or knowledge-based systems (KBS) to assist agents, but VoxIQ uses them in tandem, to provide dynamic database information to the agent in real-time as the conversation progresses with the caller.

In case you aren’t familiar with Voxify, they are one of the pioneers in the use of speech-recognition-driven automated agents in contact centers. With customers like Hammacher Schlemmer in retail and Red Lion Hotels in hospitality, Voxify agents have really taken automation in the contact center to a different level. Since coming out with these speech-enabled agents Voxify has made regular updates to the product, so I was thinking that maybe their next move would be to add some sort of speech analytics or knowledge database-driven capability to their agents, but not this round. Instead, they surprised me by announcing two other things at SpeechTEK – allowing customers to deploy their solution on-premise, instead of or in addition to the hosted solution that they have been providing, and enabling contact center managers to change routing and scripting of self-service call flows dynamically.

Although I wasn’t able to attend SpeechTek last week in New York, I did talk to a number of people who were there, along some of the vendors who were exhibiting. Based on the show floor and announcements this month, the industry has made a lot of headway into automated customer support, mobile applications, and entrance into emerging markets, such as unified communications. Here is fraction of what I missed.

I checked in with LumenVox this morning, after missing them at SpeechTek last month. With all the press that Microsoft and Nuance get (not that I have anything against either), its still nice to know that other speech technology vendors are not only thriving, but really helping niches in the market.

Just a short update on VoxIQ. Seeing as my August 19th blog title was “VoxIQ Enhances Next Generation Speech Recognition in the Contact Center and Beyond”, I figured I would have to give an update and say that VoxIQ enhances itself this time. True. VoxIQ and Loquendo announced this week that VoxIQ is using Loquendo’s Automated Speech Recognizer (Loquendo ASR) through Loquendo’s VoxNauta VoiceXML and CCXML platform to facilitate improvement in real-time call flow between agents and customers.

Interactive Intelligence announced their 3.0 release for Customer Interaction Center (CIC) and Vonexus Enterprise Interaction Center (EIC) with lots of new functionality, including integration to Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, and some features to simplify deployment. But the new security features and speech technology function were what caught my eye.

In a separate announcement, but in conjunction with its 7.5 release, ShoreTel continued to amp up its product portfolio by announcing a strategic distribution agreement with Syntellect, to sell Syntellect’s Customer Interaction Management contact center solutions. This is a superb fit for ShoreTel, who has been storming the IP telephony scene with its scalable, software-based, systems, and unified communication solutions. Until now, ShoreTel has had three contact center solutions – Workgroup and Contact Center, which are for the SMB market, and Enterprise Contact Center, which effectively goes up to 300 agents, but didn’t scale past that and wasn’t as feature-rich as many larger customers have demanded. Syntellect’s contact center offerings will give ShoreTel an extremely competitive offering in the higher end market, and fill out their portfolio.

I just read a CNET News Blog, by Steve Tobak, on what he considers to be the Top 10 Technology Flops, where he has placed speech recognition in the middle of the pack, with the words “This has to be the biggest disappointment of all, especially for Star Trek fans. But here we are, still banging away on our keyboards. At least biometrics is starting to gain some traction.” My first thought was “obviously this guy hasn’t done his research”, and then maybe, “he just didn’t define the scope of where he thought speech recognition was supposed to do in 40 years.” I think I’m leaning towards the first.

On the ninth day of UC the industry gave to me interface enhancing,
eight CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

It’s all about the user experience, and what is closer to the user than the application or device user interface. In UC one of the sexier technologies used in user interface design is speech recognition. As one of my primary research focal points I’m a big fan. In fact, I finally caved and bought a Blackberry Pearl this year just for voice-activated dialing (VAD) (I know. I’m a little slow on these things sometimes. It’s like the shoemaker not having any shoes). So, when one of the vendors that I talked to about unified communications wishes, wished for better speech recognition as an interface in mobile devices I jumped on it. Therefore, wish number nine is that ASR and UC vendors continue to overcome reliability issues for ASR used in unified communications applications, make them even simpler, and find even more useful ways to incorporate both ASR and TTS into UC application design.

Speech technologies were seemingly alive and well at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, although I was not. Standing by my sad, but seemingly repetitive tradition of not attending CES, although I’ve always wanted to, I could only stand by and read what happened there. Happily though, it seems that speech technologies made more, but minor waves in the consumer end of things with both speech recognition and text-to-speech being employed in a numerous areas, including in automotive navigation and in-vehicle entertainment systems, personal navigation systems (PNDs), gaming consoles, and desktop applications. In fact, the “big man on campus” speech tech vendor, Nuance, claims to have had their technology inside over 100 products at CES.

Yesterday I had a talk with Tellme about what they have been up to nine months or so after being acquired by Microsoft. I’d followed them since their birth back in the late 90’s during the original “voice portal” craze, when companies like Tellme, BeVocal and HeyAnita! all came into being, touting web surfing using your voice. At the time all the analysts were crazed about surfing the web using your voice. That died down for awhile, and companies such as Tellme changed their business models to incorporate application development for self service applications and the like, creating large developer networks, tools, and networks for hosting applications.

I stumbled on a new one today. I just got a new credit card from Capitol One – you know the no hassle guarantee people. It had that sticker on the front that said that you had to call to activate your card, so I did. First off, I was greeted with that irritating “press 1 for English”, but that isn’t my main beef. It was that the next prompt, surprisingly asking me to say or enter my 16-digit account code. Yippee! Speech recognition. I could almost forgive them for making me press a button because I speak English. But wait. After giving them my 16-digit account code and being transferred to an agent queue; notice I didn’t say agent; the very first words out of the agent’s mouth, once I got one were “please give me your 16-digit account code”. This company is savvy enough to use speech recognition in their application (albeit for only one prompt),but they don’t even have basic CTI? Goodness gracious. What happened to their no hassle guarantee?

There are dozens of conferences and trade shows every year tugging at the attention spans and calendars of customers, prospects, and analysts alike. Next week we have two great competing shows in the VoIP, telephony and unified communications space with VoiceCon in Orlando and VON in San Jose. In that case with topics, products and vendors being equally represented at both, my decision to attend was based on time and geography more than anything. Not so with the new Voice Search Conference that was held in San Diego this week as it was a must attend event for me. We have a lot of shows to choose from, but so few focused on speech technologies as the driver, even if those technologies are now being applied to contact centers, UC, mobility applications and other areas.

Some of the most interesting presentations given at last week’s Voice Search conference in San Diego were focused on the contact center. These sessions honed in on four aspects of using speech in the contact center. The first, and most interesting to me, was using voice user interfaces (VUIs) and speech analytics to assist contact center agents to do their jobs more effectively, and also to improve automation of IVR front-ends to contact centers, to enhance the caller experience and agent portion of the call, if required. In this context voice search is really the convergence of speech recognition and analytics to provide contact center agents with information on their screens that they normally would have had to go type to search for.

At CTIA Wireless yesterday Yahoo Inc. announced a collaboration with speech start-up Vlingo in which Vlingo will provide the speech recognition to compliment Yahoo’s oneSearch search technology for mobile phone applications. Marco Boerries, EVP of Yahoo’s Connected life division; the one that focuses on mobile products, did a demo of the new Yahoo! oneSearch at CTIA, by asking the application where is the best play to play craps in Las Vegas.

We have speech-enabled solutions for the SMB market out there already. In fact, I will be writing about some of them in a Q1 update of my 12 days of UC blog, probably next week. But Active Voice, who have been in the voice/unified messaging market for more than a decade, has finally cracked the code on providing an affordable, single-digit IQ (SDIQ ) installation, speech-enabled auto-attendant for the SMB market. That would be the many people are starting to pay attention to, but still much underserved SMB market.

It’s been a quarter since I blogged my industry wish list for unified communications, so I figured I would revisit the list to see how we are doing. I don’t want to make this a beauty contest as there have been so many announcements, big and small, particularly as we had a number of voice shows last quarter, but here are some highlights. One caveat; just because we have had a lot of announcements this quarter doesn’t mean we have marked anything off of the list. It just means we have made progress in several categories. Here is a recap of my December “wish list” song, and the category each line represents:

So summer is not completely as boring as I wrote in my Dog Days of Summer post this week. There is activity in the speech technologies bullpen.

Late last month, newcomer, Vlingo, announced a new product, Vlingo for Blackberry, which will allow users to create and send e-mails and text-messages, search the Web, work with mobile applications such as dialing their phones, look up contacts or work with their calendars - all using unconstrained speech. This speech applications works on all Blackberry devices, which I was happy about as I have a Blackberry Pearl and applications such as FaceBook, are sorely lacking in functionality on the smaller Pearl keyboard. I’m going to try out Vlingo for Blackberry. Hey, if I’m lucky they will have voice-enabled FaceBook so I can carry my social network addiction on the road. Something like Vlingo would be spot on perfect for the Blackberry Pearl, as it has a small keyboard that has dual letters for each key. FaceBook for Blackberry has a password screen that doesn’t show you the letter that you have typed in the password fields, for security reasons. The problem with this is that with the error correcting mode for typing on the Blackberry, if you can’t see your password, you have no idea what letter Blackberry has put into the password field as it tries to guess at the correct spelling of a word. It’s impossible to log on.