What makes artificial agents intelligent? We perform group thought experiments where we assume that individual technical or resource obstacles can be removed. What if we could find (or build) vast amounts of marked conversational data and “remember” all individual user-agent interactions over all time? What if speech synthesis could be as subtle and nuanced as human speech? What if speech recognition worked at human levels of accuracy? What if we could add some new magical component? Where is the biggest gap in today’s intelligent, conversational, synthetic agent platform?

How can speech technologies improve the experience of interacting with an ebook, insert and review verbal annotations from other readers, enhance dialogue with the ebook’s characters, and listen to a speech synthesized version with multiple voices? Let your imagination take over during this brainstorming discussion.

Technology transactions are critical to permit best-of-breed technologies to work together in a commercial product. Some entrepreneurs seek only to develop solutions to problems, while larger enterprises seek to develop enduring platforms. This discussion lays out the basics of a technology license transaction, then discusses initiation of negotiations and realistic expectations.

Agents can have a major impact on callers’ overall impression of a user interface (and—by extension—the company and brand). This session discusses examples of agent training that either complement the efforts of the VUI design, or undermine it. A targeted checklist of solutions is generated that attendees can immediately apply to their contact center strategy. Vendors can also gain insight on how to add this often-missed item to their toolbox of customer solutions.

Based on Michael Vickers’ best-selling book, Becoming Preferred, this keynote presentation teaches leading-edge strategies and tactics that will help place your company in the preferred position every time. Attendees learn how to become unique and distinct in a crowded marketplace, how to bring distinctive value to their customers or clients, how to build long- term economic relationships, and how to create added value to win the price war. This presentation is filled with applicable anecdotes, examples, and strategies that will give your team immediate results.

Even with the best IVR systems, there are cases in which customers require the assistance of a call center agent. If agents are made too easily available, organizations risk losing opportunities for automated self-service, but if agents are too closely guarded, organizations risk frustrating customers who can’t easily get help when they need it. Getting the balance right between self- and agent-assistance in the call center is no longer an elusive goal. Learn proven methods from the experts on how to balance agents and automation to create superior customer service.

Organizations often struggle to understand which functions to automate in an IVR system. Goss presents a method for determining appropriate goals for IVR systems to ensure both a positive customer experience and reaching business goals for automation. Leppik presents the results of a large study of the effects of companies that attempt to force customers to use automation by trying to make it hard to reach an agent.

What is the job of the designer in speech automation? Garrett explores the inherent conflict between designing to meet the needs of customers versus designing to meet company goals. Houwing discusses how design goals are often compromised due to limitations of infrastructure, software, and databases not being properly integrated. This session benefits organizations and designers struggling to balance business and design concerns.

No matter how sophisticated self-service systems become, there will always be a need for human agents to cover complex and uncommon customer requests. Yeracaris presents a method designed to help automation and human agents work together seamlessly to provide superior service to customers. Sonnick discusses the relative impact of human agents and speech technology in sales conversion rates.

Mobile applications offer new opportunities for strengthening relationships with customers. Brown highlights different types of mobile consumers and how an understanding of the ways individual consumers absorb and use mobile technologies allows banks and other institutions and organizations to consistently treat consumers in a personalized, individualized way. Stoops discusses how applying business rules of the enterprise call center to mobile applications can enable the majority of customers to bypass the conventional IVR system and connect efficiently with an agent who best meets their needs within the current resources of the call center.

There is growing interest in natural language IVRs that begin with open- ended, “How may I help you?” type questions. Olvera speaks about the importance of exceeding customer expectations not only with the initial natural language question that interprets customer requests and routes the call appropriately, but also by building underlying systems that act in intelligent and useful ways. Stavropoulou focuses on user-centered design evaluation methods that relate to the development of advanced spoken natural language user interfaces.

The best user interface design decisions are made based on data collected from customers who use the system. Lewis presents results of a study on the most effective—and somewhat surprising—method for constructing menus in speech-enabled IVR applications. Parkinson reports on a study of confirming long alphanumeric strings (such as customer or ID numbers), one of the most troublesome parts of many IVR applications.

The topic of standards or best practices for VUI design has long been a topic of discussion and debate in the design community. Organizations often request that their IVR be designed according to industry best practices, but until now, there has been no single, accepted set of principles for voice interaction design. The Association for Voice Interaction Design (AVIxD) is providing a remedy to this situation through its working group on design guidelines. Attend this session to hear the methods and preliminary results on design guidelines.

The smartphone revolution has raised customer expectations for intelligent, proactive interactions with automated systems. Claiborn discusses how automation can make use of ANI, authentication information, and toll-free number structures to offer callers customized IVR experiences based on who they are and where they have been with a company. Manchon presents a method for using multidimensional data to fully satisfy users and obviate the need for human operators in repetitive and predictable tasks.

Every project involves compromises due to time, budget, and technology constraints. When faced with such constraints, organizations too often decide to eliminate or greatly decrease the budget or timeframe for user- centered design activities such as conducting user research, running usability tests, hiring a professional voice talent, and tuning. Not every project requires a full complement of user-centric design activities, and there are smart ways to determine which methods will yield the best value for your project. Join us as expert panelists discuss how to make design choices that provide maximum value within a limited time and cost.

Customer dread and hatred of IVR systems are the subject of many cartoons, comedy skits, and stories in the popular press, yet those of us in the industry know that telephone self-service can be done well. Understanding what customers really think is often a matter of conjecture, but in this session you have the opportunity to hear the results of a rigorous academic study on customer opinions of IVR systems. Join us for an exploration of what really matters to customers in successful and accepted telephone automation.

Speech technology on smartphones has taken a great leap forward in the past year with the introduction of Apple’s Siri personal assistant. The popularity of Siri has made customers more willing to consider using speech input and output on their smartphones, but how can organizations capture this enthusiasm to provide better customer service? The panelists in this session have unique visions of how to develop a smartphone strategy and use speech-enabled personal assistants to provide a smarter, more pleasing experience for your customers.

Managing the initial design and subsequent changes to enterprise IVR applications is a persistent challenge to organizations. Bell presents a method for using a business rules system to streamline the process for making changes to enterprise IVR applications. Sampath presents a model to help analyze, define, and optimize contacts at each stage of the customer interaction to enhance cross-channel customer experience.

Customers are enthusiastically embracing the multiple methods now available for communicating with organizations, but this poses new challenges. Enabling customers to use self-service via smartphone applications provides more opportunities for customers to use self-service, which has a huge potential benefit to organizations. This panel discusses how these benefits will only be realized when organizations develop and adhere to cross-channel strategies that provide customers with a consistent, intelligent, and engaging experience across channels.

Customer care is a global effort for many large organizations. Saeger discusses the response to a survey of more than 200 international contact center executives as they identify challenges, trends, and the technology of global expansion. Ahlen analyzes the problems and solutions with bilingual customer service and makes recommendations for bilingual consumer communication strategies to help companies tap into this trillion- dollar market.

The research world is trying to solve fundamental problems in speech recognition, language understanding, gesture recognition, dialogue, and multimodal interaction, which will bring us the next generation of natural human-machine interaction systems with performance and capabilities that are miles away from what we have today. Learn about the current advancements and challenges in advanced spoken language research, and hear some perspective on what the potential fallouts are for the commercial and industrial worlds.

Voice quality is a critical measure of a service provider’s success. Learn where HD audio is currently being used, how it is expected to be implemented, and how it will affect the user experience. Miller describes how HD provides access to more information in the audio stream, which is especially useful for tasks like alphanumeric capture that are particularly sensitive to short dropouts and other acoustic problems. Machi details the evolution of HD voice as well as the current challenges and solutions to providing high-quality voice services through the cloud.

Thousands of new mobile applications have appeared, but most of them are not voice enabled. This session describes two approaches for adding voice to webpages. Burnett summarizes the proposed W3C standard API for speech recognition and speech synthesis for use directly in HTML. Di Fabbrizio describes an application that automatically generates language models to transparently enable voice interaction with existing webpages.

Halperin describes a high-level understanding of what tuning is and what we can learn from analyzing data from real-world systems. She summarizes possible solutions to common error modes, such as parameter tweaks, and grammar and lexicon updates. Normandin reviews proven techniques and best practices for maximizing the performance of speech applications including the grammar tuning process, performance metrics, developing grammars with performance in mind, setting confidence levels, phonetic pronunciations, multilingual issues, and common problems.

Two new technologies—speaker-to-speaker translation and emotion representation—will enable new classes of exciting applications. Gilbert describes a cloud-based speech platform that overcomes language barriers of mobile users. See a live demonstration of translation applications. Schroeder describes a representation for emotions—the Emotion Markup Language (EmotionML). He highlights key use cases for emotion-related information in spoken interactions.