The America Invents Act of 2011 is the first major change in U.S. patent law in more than 50 years. Changes as the “first to file” and post-grant review will alter the balance between early stage and mature companies. This session answers the following questions: What are the significant changes from the perspective of technologies? What strategies should be adopted to best take advantage of the law? What problems are addressed by the patent reform law? What are the best practices for protecting IP and gaining a competitive advantage? What are some strategies for exploiting the America Invents Act?

Will contracting with a hosted service provider reduce your overall telecommunications costs? An effective analysis of the decision points must include an examination of all factors relevant to your specific enterprise operations, infrastructure and corporate culture. Attendees will discuss specific relevant factors that must be considered in short and long term decisions. Share their own recent experiences and discuss alternatives.

We’ll scour the exhibit floor and sessions, highlighting key topics for deeper discussion. This session will have us exploring together what’s really hot and what’s not.  Come to this session to find out what is and will be the most talked about issues. Application design? Cross channel experiences? Marketing with personal assistant model applications? Speech in the cloud? Analytics? Developments on voice on mobile devices?

A growing number of IVR systems that use computer-generated speech provide a “face” using an animated avatar with lip-synced speech. (See www.speechtek.com/europe2010/avatar for examples.) The primary motivation is to more fully engage the user by using eyes as well as ears. Does doing so help or hinder communication between user and computer? Are avatars important in an eyes-busy situation such as driving? Should the avatar be humanlike or clearly a cartoon? Express your opinion.

Today, nearly 10 million people have enrolled in systems or services that use their voiceprints to improve customer care, to reset (and ultimately replace) passwords, to provide irrefutable electronic signatures, or simply to prove they are alive and eligible to receive their pensions. Beyond the basics of using a voice as a biometric means to support identification and verification, the unique characteristics of a person’s utterances are under evaluation for a fascinating set of functions surrounding detection of such human dimensions as sobriety, sentiment, and voracity. The panel members discuss new uses and applications of voice biometrics and how these will impact the security of property, people, and information.

Proactive customer care can be a powerful tool for improving customer loyalty, growing revenues, and driving productivity. Proactive customer contact has successfully been used for routine communication such as surveys, appointment reminders, and prescription refills. The possible uses for proactive communication are expanding to make proactive communication more versatile. This panel provides insights into the latest in multichannel outbound customer care and reviews the technology behind outbound loyalty programs based on CRM data.

As smartphones become a big part of the consumer lifestyle, they are being used to make purchases, pay bills, and store personal information. Webb discusses four key components for a successful voice biometric deployment, including carefully balancing security usability, engaging stakeholders early in the process, and deploying voice biometrics as part of a financial services security framework. Faulkner discusses the types of applications for which voice biometrics will provide the biggest impact, best practices for voice biometrics by financial institutions, and real-world examples of voice biometrics deployments and their effects on overall security, consumer loyalty, and enterprise ROI.

ID and passwords can be lost, stolen, and forgotten. Using voice biometrics, users are able to login to an application without having to remember anything such as an ID or a password and in so doing, login in a much more secure manner. Skerpek presents top strategies for using voice as a second factor of authentication. True discusses using smartphone-based voice biometrics to replace passwords for secure application access. The use of voice biometrics in an application login process provides an authentication solution that uses two independent ways to establish identity: A smartphone is something you have, and your voice biometric is something you are.

Once callflows are documents and prompts are scripted, many organizations believe application design is done. This ignores the significant impact of the way the audio prompts are recorded and presented to callers. Walsh demonstrates the value of professionally recorded prompts and how they improve self-service rates and customer experience. O’Sullivan presents a improve the accuracy of recognition and user experience in mobile virtual assistants in healthcare and remote patient monitoring. van Terheyden explores innovative new tools for speech-enabled clinical documentation that empower clinicians to capture information and thoughts as they occur through the innovative use of natural language, templates, and macros.

Xbox and Kinect have brought speech and voice interactions to the living room. Designing for this new and expanding space creates challenges. How will the visual interface affect what people try to say? We explore the key technical considerations and our approach to solving them, as well as where we see the next set of challenges.

Voice interaction design poses many disparate challenges to designers; this session highlights two such cases. Ferreira talks about the challenges and solutions presented when an application needs to be highly configurable and yet have a natural caller interface. Mesbur discusses the complex issue of effectively directing customers from the IVR channel to the company website to complete a transaction, supported by data from real deployments.

Ahnemann presents an alternate to the concept of design standards that may be pushed on voice interaction designers. This presentation establishes the need for a Caller Bill of Rights rather than hard-and-fast VUI standards and presents a set of 10 things that customers should be able to expect from a well-designed IVR application. The Bill of Rights is directed at company executives and call center decision makers in the hope of convincing the actual decision makers to put their customers’ needs first. When we solve real problems for callers and create a positive caller experience, automation rates and call center savings inevitably follow.

Evaluating the performance of automated self-service systems is a persistent challenge for many organizations. Weborg discusses new technologies such as visual design tools and real-time system change management that can reduce the time required to identify performance issues and allow companies to quickly identify and react to change. Neuman presents a new method called Dynamic Test Options, a powerful and flexible design methodology for testing post-production scenarios to help organizations quickly make improvements to systems.

This panel is a candid discussion of where we started and how far we have come in using speech to make the caller experience better—or not. Everyone loves what Siri can do, but Siri is truly a small slice of how speech technology has permeated consumers’ lives. Expert panelists talk about the positive, and not-so-positive, impacts of speech technology in customer contact. Learn what is changing in the market that makes speech a good bet, and discuss why speech and customer experience are tightly linked.

A key way to understand how well a company serves its customers is to look at the effort it takes customers to communicate with the company. Suhm presents the Caller Effort Index (CEI), a cross-industry benchmark that’s based on automated measurement of many dimensions of customer effort and correlated with callers expressing frustration during the call. Ball presents the concept of Customer Effort scores as an attempt to quantify the amount of work it takes for customers to work with a company.

Customer satisfaction surveys and Voice of the Customer programs have a growing importance for customer care organizations. VanScoy discusses the factors that should be considered when functional and user experience changes are needed, how such changes should be prioritized, and what data should be used to measure the success of the changes based on a real-world implementation with Blue Shield of California.

Healthcare is a domain of rapid growth for speech technologies. Tumuluri focuses on how the context-aware multimodal technology can help improve the accuracy of recognition and user experience in mobile virtual assistants in healthcare and remote patient monitoring. van Terheyden explores innovative new tools for speech-enabled clinical documentation that empower clinicians to capture information and thoughts as they occur through the innovative use of natural language, templates, and macros.

As technology providers and system integrators successfully bring their solutions to market, they’ve identified the product attributes, architectures, and deployment strategies that define the best practices in layered, multifactor, and risk-based deployments of voice biometrics. This panel discusses the challenges in designing, implementing, and deploying applications using voice biometrics and how to best meet these challenges.

New speech applications and services are empowering motorists with the ability to safely identify, locate, and engage with businesses and residences while driving in their automobile. Connecting the car will revolutionize the experience for drivers and passengers in areas of communication, entertainment, navigation, and gaming. What are the key applications in the connected car for drivers and passengers? How will speech and language technologies be used effectively to minimize a driver’s distraction? What are the business reasons and business models that will accelerate deployment of the connected car? Find out in this session.

Natural language processing is much more than just using semantic language models. It includes technology that enables computers to “understand” (that is, analyze and synthesize) by using linguistics: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, semiotics, and conversation analysis. Natural language processing will use general knowledge, background information, and context to make sense of what someone is saying. An artificial intelligence engine can add crucial abilities that allow IVRs to handle a wide range of natural conversation. Specific practical examples are provided.

Dellutri describes how multiple organizations with similar requirements can share infrastructure using a community cloud. Using the contact center as an example, learn how and when community clouds make good business sense. Frerichs describes how to take advantage of a new class of APIs that allow integration of services at a category level, pushing complexity away from the client and into the cloud. He specifically examines the key areas of natural language voice control and how to add voice capabilities to your application.