Voice XML 2.0 and 2.1 have resulted in many implementations of IVR systems by several different vendors and led to the creation of a community of knowledgeable IVR developers. Led by the W3C Voice Browser Working Group Chairperson, this session covers the current status of VoiceXML 3 and its future.

Join us for a discussion of the demographics of users of speech technology. We often plan, design, and deploy speech applications without knowing much about who will really be using the systems. In this session, you’re invited to share what you know and hear about some in-depth research on the characteristics of users of speech technology. Learn how to capitalize on these characteristics to improve the design of speech applications.

Speech is not always the best solution to meet every business need; in some cases, a DTMF may be the ideal solution to meet the needs of particular clients. However, the “press or say” paradigm is often falsely billed as a “best of both worlds.” This session includes talking points to present to clients, including debunking the myth that “press or say” is attractive from a dollar perspective, given its inherent hidden costs.

Conversation is an excellent paradigm upon which we can model human-computer interactions. Attendees can identify features of real person-to-person conversations and discuss how they can be exploited in speech-only, multimodal, and pure-mobile applications. Using examples from existing systems, attendees analyze these features to learn how to apply them to make a user experience truly conversational.

In an increasingly mobile world, our devices will become an extension of ourselves, embracing elements of artificial intelligence, voice, and natural language understanding to not only deliver desired information, but also always be ready to listen, understand, and assist. Attend this panel to understand what new technologies will enable greater accuracy in speech recognition and new capabilities in conversational systems in the next 3 years. Plus, learn how the user interface will change and evolve; how consumers’ lives will change; and what new standards, guidelines, and reusable software are needed and who will develop them.

Join us as industry leaders discuss the current and future role of speech technology in the complex and ever-shifting world of customer interaction. What will the customer service channel mix look like in 5 years as voice, web, mobile, and social media channels evolve? How will speech-enabled virtual assistants affect customer service? Panelists explore these and other questions in this forward-looking discussion.

Today, most people wouldn’t deal with a company that doesn’t have a website. Tomorrow, they won’t deal with one that doesn’t have a company personal assistant. Digital personal assistants offer organizations the ability to present a single point of contact to customers to relieve them of the burden of finding the resources that meet their needs. Personal assistants allow customers to simply describe their problem and receive the specific help they need. Join us for a discussion of the benefits of personal assistants and the strategies for creating them.

Today, there’s a wide gap between the service experiences customers want from the organizations they do business with vs. what they get when attempting to self-serve from IVRs, Web sites and mobile apps. The answer? A new generation of intelligent self-service solutions, led by Nuance’s Nina Multichannel Virtual Assistants, in which technology adapts to customers instead of the other way around.

This session presents compelling evidence for the viability of highly specialized enterprise personal assistants that target a well- defined client base solving a narrow set of specialized, domain- specific problems. Two recently deployed enterprise personal assistant applications highlight key user interface challenges and show how voice can be used as the primary interaction mode to provide a rich, empowering experience for the user.

Analytics provides detailed data about usage patterns but can leave you guessing about what the customer was thinking. Customer feedback programs deliver rich insights into why users do things but can be expensive to implement on a large enough scale to explain specific user behaviors. This session presents a technique for combining analytics and customer feedback to learn both what happened and why the customer did what he did.

Sun Life Financial experienced major stability issues within its call center infrastructure. Learn how the company overcame these issues with a new call center infrastructure that provides the foundation for a highly resilient service. See how the new infrastructure provides the foundation for additional call center services, such as speech analytics, mobility, enhanced reporting and agent workforce planning, and agent virtualization. Additionally, learn how the IP infrastructure allows the services to provide global scale and reach, and how it can also be extended to include new channels for customer interactions such as social media.

Traditional IVR projects follow well-known methodologies (such as waterfall), which tend to involve customer service and telephony departments within an organization. But when speech moves out of the call center into other service channels, such as mobile, both methodologies as well as participants involved radically change. This session explores the implications of designing new mobile interactions in a more agile and app-centered world.

“Persona” is a loaded term that often conjures images of over-the-top prompting and has spurred many debates among VUI designers. In this workshop, we discuss findings from the AVIxD Design Guidelines Working Group on what persona really means and why it’s important in every speech application. Learn how to research and build an appropriate persona from the start, and work together on a persona makeover using techniques that can optimize your existing applications.

Today, there’s a wide gap between the service experiences customers want from the organizations they do business with vs. what they get when attempting to self-serve from IVRs, Web sites and mobile apps. The answer? A new generation of intelligent self-service solutions, led by Nuance’s Nina Multichannel Virtual Assistants, in which technology adapts to customers instead of the other way around.

Most commonly used to identify design pitfalls before application deployment, usability testing can also be used to compare a current design with proposed design enhancements. The session explores the value of champion challenger usability testing, presents tips and techniques for effective testing, and discusses example test results to demonstrate to both designers and business owners how this technique can be used to improve your speech application.

We’re all used to traditional systems that rely on treelike structures, starting at a root menu, which branches off into multiple options and functions that users have to discover and traverse in real time. This session discusses the latest shift in interaction design, enabling systems and users to hold more natural dialogues in fairly unstructured ways, which pave the way for more assistantlike interactions.

Learn how speech and natural language technologies are used with applications for managing open-source intelligence information about natural disasters, pandemics, and social disruptions such as the Arab Spring. What are the challenges now that traditional media has evolved to include information from many different sources including TV, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter? What will be the role of speech and language technologies in the future to help clients be universally prepared for random, dynamic, and mostly chaotic events?

Most companies admittedly don’t spend enough time on user research, in part because of confusion about the types and purposes of user research. Attend this session to get an understanding of the difference between personas, use cases, focus groups, and usability testing. Learn the key benefits of each technique and how user research plays a critical role in the success of your speech, mobile, web, and multichannel design.

Selling customer experience design and evaluation activities to business stakeholders is often difficult, and customer experience professionals are often asked to demonstrate the financial benefits of these activities before investments are made. Panelists discuss strategies for convincing leaders of organizations to integrate customer experience activities into projects and ideas for educating stakeholders on the value of these activities.

Today, there’s a wide gap between the service experiences customers want from the organizations they do business with vs. what they get when attempting to self-serve from IVRs, Web sites and mobile apps. The answer? A new generation of intelligent self-service solutions, led by Nuance’s Nina Multichannel Virtual Assistants, in which technology adapts to customers instead of the other way around.

An unspoken truth among consultants is that we find ourselves giving the same advice to many of our clients. Across industries, customer care models, and customer profiles, there are certain core lessons that almost all client organizations need, which can hinder them as they begin speech projects. Join this expert panel as they share the lessons that can help you prepare and hit the ground running with your next speech project.

Creating compelling, personalized, over-the-phone experiences is a common goal for organizations, but achieving it can be challenging. Panelists in this session share their experiences and offer guidance on collecting, analyzing, and applying key insights from data to improve customer experiences. Learn specific methods and hone your own strategy through the on-the-ground experiences of our panelists.

We present multiple case studies to describe the most common major pitfalls in an implementation of a new speech solution, and describe very specific methods to overcome these challenges. Highlights include getting the right vendor at the right time; leveraging existing technology; assessing whether you’re on the right path; how to check the direction of the project before it is too late; the project ecosystem; and making technology do the grunt work, thereby speeding up time to market.

We challenge the commonly held belief that written language requires formal instruction and schooling, whereas spoken language is seamlessly acquired from birth onward by natural interactions with people who talk. We describe physical systems that exploit developments in behavioral science and technology to automatically recognize speech, objects, and actions and to display corresponding written descriptions. The goal is to create an interactive system to enable infants, toddlers, and preschool children to acquire literacy naturally.

Users expect a natural interaction where they don’t have to repeat information they have already provided and one that will incorporate their words and their actions on the screen. Applications need to keep track of what’s happened so far and use this to intelligently interpret what’s said next. This session highlights the significant contributions of dialogue research that can guide us today in making truly conversational systems and shows examples in applications developed on Xtone’s Xavi platform.

Today, there’s a wide gap between the service experiences customers want from the organizations they do business with vs. what they get when attempting to self-serve from IVRs, Web sites and mobile apps. The answer? A new generation of intelligent self-service solutions, led by Nuance’s Nina Multichannel Virtual Assistants, in which technology adapts to customers instead of the other way around.

A system is discussed in which a person may use a smart phone, PDA or any other handheld computer as a “passport” or “key” for an authentication mechanism to make a purchase, conduct a transaction, access account information, gain access to a restricted area or conduct remote transactions over the Internet. In the process, a multi-factor authentication is used. The discussed system can be used in the absence of a central network connection, only using a local network.

Mobile LTE, HD PSTN, and HTML5/WebRTC make high quality (HD) audio possible from consumers into automated speech systems, multimodal applications, live agents, and recording/speech analytics platforms. This talk will explore the value of HD audio, discuss technical requirements, and outline potential hurdles and issues to address when planning and executing an HD audio project.

You will learn what drives language translation technology, and how that has changed over the past two decades.  You will come away with a rudimentary understanding of statistical vs semantic MT, and take a look at how Interlingua language technologies are finally a reality.  We will also take a look at several speech to translated speech products and how they interface with language translation technologies.