Designed for attendees new to the speech technology arena, this tutorial provides an overview of today’s key speech technologies. What are the major types of speech recognition engines? Do speaker identification and verification really work? Is there a need for touchtone recognition in interactive voice response systems? Who drives the speech dialogue— the user, the computer, or both? Where are natural language processing technologies, such as natural language recognition, machine translation, response generation, and summarization used today? Should you consid- er speech applications on mobile devices? Untangle the voice standards alphabet: VoiceXML, SSML, SRGS, CCXML, PLS, SCXML, and more.

Jump-start your knowledge of voice user interface design. This session is designed to quickly get those new to VUI design up-to-speed so they can make the most of the Voice Interaction Design track at the conference. This tutorial illustrates why VUI design is the make-or-break factor for speech applications and how to make smart design decisions from Day 1. Learn how to encourage customers to accept and use speech automation by focusing on the perceptions and reactions of end users throughout the design process. This tutorial covers the basics in VUI design: technology current and future state (including multimodality), speech project methodology, design principles and caller rules for efficient and no-nonsense call flows, and evaluation techniques to learn what works and what real customers think.

This course teaches attendees how to design and build multimodal applications. The emphasis is on mobile applications that combine speech and graphics, but other input modalities such as pen or stylus and sensors are also discussed. Both designing and building multimodal applications are discussed as well. The design section covers such topics as the principles of multimodal design, how to determine whether multimodality is a good fit for an application, the components of a multimodal application, 10 key differences between voice-only and multimodal design, initiating voice input, the role of the graphical environment in supporting speech recognition, pros and cons of avatars, integrating touch and voice input, and accommodating different types of users. The development section includes topics such as multimodal platforms, development tools, standards, and evaluation of multimodal applications.

This workshop has been cancelled.

The objective of this tutorial is to provide information about current leading practices in speech user interface design, many of which are not intuitive. After attending the tutorial, participants will have reviewed the bases of speech user interface design and will have had practice in writing introductions, menus, prompts, and in conducting Wizard of Oz evaluations. The presentation includes many multimedia examples from the presenter’s experience in R&D and consulting.

The smartphone presents a set of usability challenges that can be solved only with a combination of all input and output modalities available to the user. In this workshop, we review some basic principles for building highly usable, multimodal applications. The principles will be illustrated through concrete implementation examples.

Methods for optimizing touchtone and speech applications have matured. Just as holistic views of the application replaced narrow efforts focused only on prompts or the recognition engine, the newest approaches step back even more and examine caller success from dialing to hang-up. This course teaches you how to obtain a detailed and quantified road map for improving your applications, leveraging end-to-end data from live inbound calls. Topics include understanding caller behavior and intent, measuring dissatisfiers and inefficiencies, and identifying the highest-impact improvement opportunities. Using actual case studies and class exercises, the course covers a framework and methodology that you can use to manage both in-house and vendor-partner projects.

Customer feedback—either through usability testing or as part of an ongoing program of continuous improvement—is extremely helpful when improving speech applications and validating changes. This session discusses what makes an effective customer feedback program, different types of feedback (and when they are appropriate), and how to analyze the feedback.

There are a variety of choices for speech recognition engines, especially for languages other than English. Although many companies are comfortable performing business case analyses across speech recognition engine vendors, it is often difficult to know how to compare accuracy. This hands-on, in-depth course shows you how to select an appropriate evaluation data set, why transcription is important and how to do it properly, how to perform the evaluation, and how to analyze and interpret the results.