The Speech Technology Consortium is a new nonprofit organization designed to help foster innovation across the speech industry by providing support for patent and IP issues. The discussion will describe STC’s work on creating a prior art library that can be used to help companies both create patents and protect against litigation. The discussion will also highlight issues in the U.S. patent system and the changes that may help to address them.

The relationship between the VUI designer and the client plays a critical role in determining whether or not a speech application is successful. Misunderstandings may lead to expensive rewrites and strained relationships, but good communication can lead to win-win solutions. Join us for a frank discussion of the potential roadblocks that can hamper effective vendorclient communication, share stories of your experiences, and brainstorm solutions for building positive and productive relationships.

Graphical User Interfaces frequently use common widgets such as pulldown menus and form fill-in boxes. Users familiar with these widgets can quickly learn to use other applications that contain the same widgets. What are candidate common widgets for voice applications and can they be used across multiple applications on various platforms? What are the pros and cons of standardized voice widgets?

Avatars are realistic representations of humans that gesture and speak to users. Avatars are beginning to appear in speech applications that present information such as newscasts and email readers or guide users to perform complex instructions. Are applications enhanced by these eye-catching avatars? Or, do avatars distract users and take up screen real estate? Listen to the various viewpoints, both pro and con, on this interesting and provocative concept, and add your own opinion and experience.

Emily Yellin traversed the country and the world watching, listening, and talking to customers, customer service workers, managers, consultants, and corporate CEOs in a cross-section of industries for her book, Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us. In this presentation, she shares some of the universal truths she found at the global crossroads of customer-company interactions that is customer service. Yellin’s thought-provoking yet practical message and her entertaining, instructive, and revealing anecdotes cut across all industries, nationalities, and levels of technological sophistication.

Analytics is among the hottest topics in the speech industry and can provide valuable insight into what your customers are doing and what they need. This session will distinguish different types of analytics solutions to help you evaluate your options. Attend this panel discussion to learn the basics so you can make a smart business decision about deploying analytics within your organization.

“Natural language” solutions are offered by many speech vendors, but it can be difficult to determine if natural language fits your situation. Attend this informative session to learn the benefits and limitations of natural language speech solutions to help understand if it’s right for your organization. Hear what it really takes to design and deploy natural language, and hear compelling research on whether natural language really works for customers.

Explore the business benefits of including mobile and multimodal solutions as part of your customer self-service offerings. Learn how providing your customers the opportunity to use self-service for mobile devices can provide a positive experience, no matter where your customers are, and how including speech plus other modalities can boost customers’ willingness and ability to use self-service.

What’s new in mobile voice search and what could it mean for your organization? Attend this informative panel to learn what the biggest players in the industry are saying about mobile voice search today. You’ll hear different perspectives on the new opportunities offered by mobile voice search and learn how your business can capitalize on these opportunities.

Offering excellent customer service in a recovering economy can be a challenge. Customer care organizations are being tasked with building loyalty and exceeding customer expectations while reducing the amount of company resources they use. Attend this session to learn how speech technology can help your organization meet these competing goals. Learn how smart planning can make speech self-service part of a successful customer service strategy.

Outbound IVR offers many benefits to organizations for proactive communication with customers, but without effective strategy, outbound calls can fall on deaf ears. Attend this session to learn valuable lessons in planning and implementing outbound IVR solutions in a way that helps you meet business goals by understanding the impact of outbound calls on your customers.

Emily Yellin traversed the country and the world watching, listening, and talking to customers, customer service workers, managers, consultants, and corporate CEOs in a cross-section of industries for her book, Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us. In this presentation, she shares some of the universal truths she found at the global crossroads of customer-company interactions that is customer service. Yellin’s thought-provoking yet practical message and her entertaining, instructive, and revealing anecdotes cut across all industries, nationalities, and levels of technological sophistication.

How do we best serve our increasingly mobile customer bases? Providing an excellent experience for mobile customers requires that organizations rethink the entire customer relationship. Mobile customers have unique needs and wants, and our self-service applications must adapt to ensure that we meet these needs. Join us for a discussion of how the mobile experience is an opportunity to delight your customers.

Communicating with customers via the speech channel is unique, and organizations face additional challenges when speech is one of several modes of communication. This session will help you understand the factors that determine how to optimize speech for mobile applications when speech is one of several possible methods of interacting with customers.

Organizations interact with customers in many channels today. No longer are customer relationships dominated by the website and call center; today, we must also consider mobile applications, SMS, live chat, Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, fax, and more. How do you use speech technology to its best advantage in this complex environment? Come to learn how speech can help you build loyalty, delight, and stickiness for your customer self-service program.

The World Wide Web consortium has specified new languages that enable many new capabilities in speech applications. Implement new usage scenarios by writing your own flow control using State Chart XML (SCXML). Use Call Control XML (CCXML) to set up phone conferences, connect new people into a conference, eject people from a conference, track a  person down by calling numbers where the person might be, and many other advanced call features.

Customers today have high expectations for their interactions with organizations. One-size-fits-all self-service is no longer acceptable to many customers. Join us for two expert views on how to use what you know about your customers to create personalized interactions for each of them. Learn why customized interactions are valuable and how your organization can start offering proactive, personalized solutions for each of your customers.

Organizations understand the importance of providing a positive and effective experience to customers across all touchpoints, but it can be difficult to make sense of the various methods of evaluating customer experience. Join us as expert panelists discuss the benefits and limitations of different metrics and techniques for measuring the customer experience at your organization.

Emily Yellin traversed the country and the world watching, listening, and talking to customers, customer service workers, managers, consultants, and corporate CEOs in a cross-section of industries for her book, Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us. In this presentation, she shares some of the universal truths she found at the global crossroads of customer-company interactions that is customer service. Yellin’s thought-provoking yet practical message and her entertaining, instructive, and revealing anecdotes cut across all industries, nationalities, and levels of technological sophistication.

Emily Yellin traversed the country and the world watching, listening, and talking to customers, customer service workers, managers, consultants, and corporate CEOs in a cross-section of industries for her book, Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us. In this presentation, she shares some of the universal truths she found at the global crossroads of customer-company interactions that is customer service. Yellin’s thought-provoking yet practical message and her entertaining, instructive, and revealing anecdotes cut across all industries, nationalities, and levels of technological sophistication.

In this session, we present a report on the findings from the 2009 workshop of the Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD), which focused on customization for speech applications. The panel will discuss the three articles which resulted from the workshop and share recommendations for including customization to improve the customer experience of your selfservice solution.

Join us to learn tricks of the trade from two speech experts. The first presentation dissects the seemingly simple, but often vexing, issue of effective prompting for yes/no questions. We switch gears in the second presentation to learn how adding weights to grammar items can help you achieve better recognition performance.

Designing effective and engaging voice interactions for customers is a complex task that requires the designer to balance multiple competing concerns. Let the experts show you how to follow the data trail of issues first discovered in usability testing and track them through tuning to help optimize voice interactions. Also learn how to evaluate different versions of prompts and menus to select the one that works best for customers.

Recognition of alphanumeric strings remains one of the most challenging tasks for automatic speech recognition systems. This places limits on speech self-service systems because alphanumeric strings are used frequently to identify customers using strings such as account and ID numbers, email addresses, record locators, and order numbers. Attend this session to hear the latest strategies for improving alphanumeric recognition.

VUI designers need to know more than just design principles to produce useful designs. They also need the skills to educate clients on and advocate for the best design practices, as well as negotiation skills to eliminate barriers to good design. This highly interactive session will use social science and personality archetyping to help individual designers understand the role of personality and learn skills to navigate these situations more successfully.

Voice user interface design remains an underserved profession, and practitioners have unmet needs that limit their ability to effectively do their job and grow their skill sets. We invite all VUI designers to participate in this session as we discover and prioritize the needs of the VUI community. Come for a lively discussion of the tools, research, training, and standards that will benefit the VUI design profession.

Attendees will test-drive the latest tools for developing voice applications, including voice dialogues, grammar managers, prompt managers, voice application testing systems, and libraries of reusable components for voice applications. Determine the amount of ramp-up time necessary to use each development tool as well as how easy each tool is to use. Judge which development tools significantly decrease application development time and how much previous design components can be reused.

Natural language has long been the holy grail of conversational systems. Test-drive new natural language systems that understand what you speak. Determine the strengths and weaknesses of natural language systems versus traditional form-fill systems such as VoiceXML. Get firsthand experience on the issue of domain coverage versus development time. Test-drive machine-to-machine translations systems. Note that this lab does not demonstrate statistical language models such as those used in call routing.

Test-drive a variety of analytic tools. Learn how they can help you better understand what your users are doing and what they need. Evaluate various analytic tools in action, and judge for yourself if their results provide valuable insight. Determine the amount of ramp-up time necessary to use each tool and how easy each tool is to use. See if these tools provide you with the kind of information you need to improve your contact-center services and speech-enabled systems.