Leading analysts predict that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the dominant web access device worldwide by 2013. In this session, we'll discuss UI design fro mobile customer self-service, developing native apps for Android and iOS, as well as the future of HTML5.

Unlike many professions, there’s no traditional educational path to becoming a speech application developer or VUI designer. Some developers have backgrounds in related fields like linguistics, psychology, or computer science and learn the specifics of speech application development on the job. This session discusses how current application developers learned their skills, what they wish they knew more about, existing educational resources—including online, vendor-specific, and university-based options—and what other resources are needed that aren’t currently available.

This presentation discusses the various methods for removing sensitive information to satisfy the requirements of widely accepted data security standards such as the Payment Card Industry (PCI DSS). It also discusses important metrics that allow call centers to understand the trade-offs in trying to remove sensitive information from their call recordings.

It has been a busy year for the world of patents and speech! The American Invents Act finally passed last fall, Nuance acquired Vlingo after a contentious litigation, and new patents are issuing every month in speech technologies. How do these items affect the future of the speech world? JOin us to ask questions and debate the effects of patents and speech inquiring minds!

Where is the industry heading? Voice has taken center stage in the last year, especially since October with the introduction of Siri. Unique and sophisticated apps and services that make the human-machine interaction natural and simple are rapidly coming to market. So how will this spotlight on voice, when combined with the advances in natural language understanding (NLU) and intent-driven interactions, change the way we interact with devices and cars? Are voice-enabled virtual assistants an industry inflection point or just a fad? What technologies will converge to create useful and usable virtual assistants? In addition to smartphones, which devices will be used to interact with virtual assistants? How will businesses, manufacturers, and consumers embrace virtual voice assistants? Which markets and industries stand to benefit the most from the voice-enabled virtual assistant trend?

Analytics offer organizations vast amounts of data to transform the automated customer experience, but using this data requires strategy and expertise. Minkara describes the strategic business activities and technology deployments required to personalize each customer interaction to build a 5-star customer experience program. Dawson discusses the trends shaping speech analytics and how it is moving closer to business intelligence and big data processes.

As organizations fully embrace cross-channel customer contacts, they are faced with a new range of planning and strategy tasks. Nowlin-Green presents a checklist of foundation elements every contact center needs, including developing a contact history database, and accurate knowledgebase, and how to plan and prepare your environment for the customer experience of the future. Sharma presents the benefits of a well-designed, unified, multichannel application framework that increases customer satisfaction and retention.

Over the past 20 years customer self-service has changed dramatically from basic touch-tone IVR to intelligent-speech IVR, email, web, SMS, chat, mobile web, social and smart phone application channels. As an industry we should expect as much, if not more change over the next 20 years. Jonathan will reflect on the last 20 years of self-service advancements and also predict some of the changes we'll likely see in the next 20 years.

How do you measure the success of your IVR system? This is a persistent challenge for organizations. Voss explains and compares different types of IVR success measures, including containment, task completion, abandonment, completion, and success rates, along with the difficulties in identifying outcomes and interpreting them. Suendermann discusses adaptation and optimization of speech recognition and understanding as well as dialogue management as a method for understanding the success of IVR systems.

Cross-channel customer contact affects many parts of the organization, but perhaps none are affected as directly as the call center. Kaiser outlines best practices for building a robust business case analysis to support cross- channel opportunities within your organization by moving beyond call deflection as a measure of success. Wulfraat discusses the challenges of supporting multichannel communications along with managing day-to- day contact centers, which are now being asked to drive revenue and build customer lifetime value.

Learn how two different companies have benefited from using speech analytics. Aetna has revised customer agent training to turn negative interactions into positive experiences. Managers in the Garanati Pension call center are able to access details of conversations between customers and call center personnel without listening to individual conversations and can take action immediately to improve poor agent performance and business operations.

Customers now contact organizations using multiple devices with varying capabilities, but designing a unique application for each device is impractical and expensive. Baul discusses how to create experiences from real-time data about the user’s mobile device and how to use new design idioms and best practices to enhance the experience of the smartphone user. Suendermann presents a method for using the accumulated speech science knowledge to reshape and transform multimodal designs.

For all the buzz surrounding multimodal applications, we understand very little about what people do when they have the chance to interact with a mobile device that recognizes both speech and gesture. Milroy discusses how smart phone interactions raise user expectations and require evolving methods for designing and evaluating user interactions in order to meet these expectations.  Balentine presents a unique model of speech interactions and highlights its benefits to users over current approaches

Over the past 20 years customer self-service has changed dramatically from basic touch-tone IVR to intelligent-speech IVR, email, web, SMS, chat, mobile web, social and smart phone application channels. As an industry we should expect as much, if not more change over the next 20 years. Jonathan will reflect on the last 20 years of self-service advancements and also predict some of the changes we'll likely see in the next 20 years.

Moving from design of unimodal speech-enabled applications to multi- modal smartphone applications is not always straightforward. Bouzid highlights fundamental differences between these contexts and how we can transfer what we have learned from telephony-based IVR space to build highly usable voice solutions on the smartphone platform. Kelly discusses how understanding users, their environments, their devices, and available software tools can allow organizations to create powerful, engaging multimodal designs.

Design documentation faces a host of challenges because it is used by many different audiences to describe interactions across multiple modalities. Owens discusses the challenges of creating design documentation that is able to show different levels of detail to enable differing audiences to clearly understand the design. Pelland presents a method of situation-based design that allows both speech and visual interfaces to be designed using traditional methods with only a few changes.

Prior to deployment of a biometric speaker verification system that is lan- guage- and accent-independent, a large volume of calls required identity verification via a manual agent-assisted procedure. This was causing both time loss and customer dissatisfaction. After deployment, the average call duration was reduced and customers provided positive feedback. Rather than dealing with PINs, passwords, and challenge questions, customers are easily identified by the system before completing their secure transactions.

Cross-channel customer contact is a reality, but understanding how, when, and why customers choose one channel and switch to another is a challenging problem. Nguyen presents a method of understanding customer experience as a journey, which is comprised of a series of tasks that lead to a specific outcome that must be woven together into a seamless and intuitive experience. Cascio discusses building customer experience maps and life cycle journeys to drive customer loyalty and provide superior experiences.

Enterprise contact centers routinely record conversations for post-call use, such as regulatory compliance and quality monitoring. Rehor describes how visionary companies are beginning to use modern analytics applications that leverage live media streaming and open recording on the network to provide real-time business intelligence that guides customer care representatives toward speedier, more accurate resolution of caller issues. Arslan describes ways to obtain reliable and robust speech analytic parameters such as hesitations and breathing, and how these parameters can be useful in agent quality monitoring in speech analytics.

Over the past 20 years customer self-service has changed dramatically from basic touch-tone IVR to intelligent-speech IVR, email, web, SMS, chat, mobile web, social and smart phone application channels. As an industry we should expect as much, if not more change over the next 20 years. Jonathan will reflect on the last 20 years of self-service advancements and also predict some of the changes we'll likely see in the next 20 years.

Analytics—analysis of recorded conversations between users and automated systems—promises to reveal various problems in the user experience. This session aims to answer the following questions: What are the various types of analytics and what kind of data do they produce? How can this data be used to improve the user experience as well as the company’s bottom line?

Today’s cross-channel customer experience can sometimes be disorganized and fragmented, which results in decreased efficiency and reduced rates of self-service. Middleton discusses how the speech customer experience across multiple channels can be used to decrease costs and increase customer service. Nordale presents real-world examples of companies that have gone from being strictly IVR to delivering outbound and multi-modal interactions and the business case for multichannel interactions to drive customer satisfaction and continued usage.

Ramos describes how mobile users are able to connect with a warehouse management system to improve operating efficiencies and ensure stores are properly stocked for customers.  Pannala discsses how BNY Mellon implemented multimodal mobile financial services.

This follow-up session to the keynote panel discusses ways to achieve the intelligent voice agent vision. It aims to answer the following questions: How can you participate in the voice-enabled virtual assistant movement? What standard formats and protocols are necessary to enable providers to make their services and content available to virtual assistants? Who should specify these standards? How will virtual assistants discover new services and content and make them available to users? How will user interface designers make user interactions with virtual assistants easy and natural? What security mechanisms will guarantee a safe and hacker-free environment for virtual assistants and their users and contact/service providers? How can you enable assistants to follow customers from one device to another? How do virtual assistants interact with each other?

To remain competitive with smartphone applications, IVR applications must add new features and capabilities. Feinberg describes how location- based services will deliver better customer experiences and higher automation success rates. Szczurek describes how new APIs can transform voice-only IVRs into next-generation visual IVRs that work with any network, any phone, and most mobile devices—without discarding existing IVRs, adding infrastructure, or requiring callers to use special phone networks.

Over the past 20 years customer self-service has changed dramatically from basic touch-tone IVR to intelligent-speech IVR, email, web, SMS, chat, mobile web, social and smart phone application channels. As an industry we should expect as much, if not more change over the next 20 years. Jonathan will reflect on the last 20 years of self-service advancements and also predict some of the changes we'll likely see in the next 20 years.

New approaches are needed to develop effective conversational speech interfaces. Vassos discusses multichannel, natural language understanding dialogue management based on a purely declarative, channel-agnostic dialogue model, which enables the realization of the “develop once, deploy everywhere” concept. Thomson summarizes work by the AVIOS Advanced Dialog Forum to minimize development cost, distribute dialogue control in a multimodal environment, and build cross-industry and industry/academia collaboration. The presentation will include a demo and links so audience members can experiment with some of the solutions presented.

Dahl discusses the pros and cons of existing multimodal platforms and tools and how voice and multimodal standards can reduce the risk of being locked into proprietary technologies. Monegan describes how to provide a seamless customer experience across many channels, including speech, web, and mobile, by using a predictive multichannel platform.

The merger of two premier brokerage businesses required building all new call center applications from the IVR to CTI to agent desktops to a mainframe. A major Australian bank transformed a contact center to support 28 business units. Both speakers explain the goals, the process, measures of success, and the lessons learned while deploying these major call center changes.

Mingle with exhibitors, speakers, and conference attendees while enjoying good food and drinks.