Some people are concerned that their privacy will be compromised by Google Glass users taking pictures without indicating that pictures are being taken. Others are concerned that their private conversations will be recorded. Will Google Glass distract drivers? A more general issue—what is the trade-off between privacy rights and the recording of activities using Google Glass, mobile phones, and monitoring devices?

The current model for IVRs is based on a defensive strategy of caller containment, leading to high levels of dissatisfaction from callers. With the customer data now available to corporations, what will it take to create a new model for IVRs that is predictive, proactive, and focused on effective self-service and timely routing? Will organizations be willing to accept a new model? Join us in this discussion to share your ideas and opinions about the changing role of IVR in today’s multichannel world.

With smartphones being used for more customer engagements, IVR has again become an integral part of the customer journey. The trick is to find a solution that your customers will actually use. New IVR technology can provide “smart help” to promote a true omnichannel customer experience strategy for your company. This session discusses how IVR systems can personalize and create a consistent user experience from the smartphone.

Speech morphing (or voice morphing) is changing one person’s voice to sound like another person. There are many technical issues to be dealt with, including the size and shape of the vocal apparatus, the pitch of his or her speech, the particular habits of the two speakers, the accents of the two people, and other linguistic elements. What are the strengths and weaknesses of voice morphing? When is voice morphing appropriate?

Intelligent speech and language systems are here. It’s taken years for disparate technologies—speech recognition, synthesis, biometrics, language understanding, artificial intelligence—to develop along their separate evolutionary paths. Now the basic technologies are at your disposal, and you are empowered to succeed. But it takes more than vision and a few software tools to exploit the new voice interface. In this media-rich multimodal presentation, Bruce Balentine explores design issues for present and future products. How will our lives be changed by speech and voice? What are the emerging paradigms for natural language understanding, super-natural language, and small-footprint micro-voice appliances? What can we expect in the next 5 years? And what should you consider doing about it?

Combinations of automated speech recognition and voice biometric resources are being embedded in mobile devices and hosted in the cloud to serve as a platform for highly personalized, secure, and trusted communications. This presentation describes underlying technologies and showcases applications of the technologies for improved customer care, home electronics, and connected cars.

The session presents the stories of three new voice biometric mobile apps, from initial qualification to launch and globalization. The first story showcases a U.S.-based bank that deployed voice biometrics as one factor in a multifactor authentication approach for app login and for countersigning money transfers. Next, voice biometrics was offered as an alternative to passwords to login to a credentialing app and also in an app for healthcare services.

Mobile employees need dictation solutions that conveniently fit their schedules and environments — whether in an office, at home, or traveling. Likewise, companies need cost-effective tools to support their employees. We will demonstrate how professional voice technology enhances your daily work life using smartphones and a cloud-based dictation solution. Sharing case studies of law firms, insurance companies, police departments and other organizations will illustrate how speech technology is gaining acceptance among all types of professionals.

Speech analytics plays a critical role when measuring customer intent through a simple phone call. This session provides real-world examples of brands that are using speech analytics to better understand and get the most out of their advertising campaigns. The widespread adoption of smartphones means more people call businesses directly after a mobile search or after receiving details via social, email, or text, which makes the insight that comes from speech analytics even more valuable.

Passwords are no longer sufficient to protect your users. Adding voice verification for strong authentication is now easy with AT&T’s Speech API. The availability of multifactor authentication enhances the security of this API offer. Learn about new features of AT&T’s Speech API, including voice verification; understand the benefits of these exciting new features; and see how to incorporate them into your app using specific code examples. Demonstrations make it super clear.

Find out about an analytics tool the City of Toronto implemented in its 24/7 311 Contact Center that enables the call center to automatically analyze and categorize all call recordings. The tool lets the call center easily analyze customer voice interactions and understand pain points while making sure recommendations are implemented.

Consider Becky, a USAA member who is looking at homeowner’s insurance options online, but has a question and decides to call. After she authenticates, the IVR notes that Becky was logged into the website and asks if she is calling for a homeowner’s insurance quote. Becky happily confirms that is indeed her intention. Many businesses see such proactive, cross-channel scenarios as a pipe dream, but this presentation reviews the quantitative and qualitative methods used to understand customer cross-channel behavior and create user interface designs that support them.

Sharing context among all the possible channels of communication is essential for delivering exceptional customer service in a multichannel world. Customers expect organizations to know who they are and to be aware of past and ongoing interactions, regardless of the channel they choose. Panelists in this session outline techniques for capturing, analyzing, and sharing contextual intelligence among self-service channels and with agents.

Mobile employees need dictation solutions that conveniently fit their schedules and environments — whether in an office, at home, or traveling. Likewise, companies need cost-effective tools to support their employees. We will demonstrate how professional voice technology enhances your daily work life using smartphones and a cloud-based dictation solution. Sharing case studies of law firms, insurance companies, police departments and other organizations will illustrate how speech technology is gaining acceptance among all types of professionals.

Despite years of talk about designing seamless cross-channel apps and readily available platforms and tools, few truly seamless experiences exist. Designers lack a consistent, coordinated way of integrating the designs of applications in different channels into a single user experience. This session explores a lightweight process which brings together designers from different channels using a simple notation for coordinating between applications that allows each channel to be designed, developed, and deployed separately.

Our world has gone omnichannel as customers connect through multiple channels, devices, and applications. This workshop sets up a real-world omnichannel design problem and then interactively arrives at possible solutions. You learn that some very obvious solutions are not so obvious after all. During this session, we review data from our experience, designing a suite of forward-thinking applications and arriving at informed design decisions.

PECO (Pennsylvania utility company) completely redesigned its IVR to integrate predictive intent functionality to anticipate the reason for customer calls. Baltimore Gas and Electric has maintained its traditional IVR structure of DTMF menus. Hear lessons learned and the results of the “bake-off” between these two approaches to IVR design.

Devices throughout our homes are suddenly smart and connected and allow us to communicate with them through a variety of channels. Today, we can talk to our game consoles, thermostats, and televisions, but what will the digital home look like in 5 years? How and where does speech technology fit in this evolution? Panelists in this session discuss the benefits of the connected home as well as obstacles to achieving the reality of the digital home.

This session is an exploration into design considerations and the lessons learned when introducing speech and open natural language contexts into company-specific mobile apps using virtual assistants. Based on experiences gained in engagements and analysis of usage data, this session focuses on defining the benefits of speech in mobile apps; understanding the assistant paradigm in company-specific apps; establishing harmony between speech, tap and screen; conversational models; and what to do when interactions go south.

Mobile employees need dictation solutions that conveniently fit their schedules and environments — whether in an office, at home, or traveling. Likewise, companies need cost-effective tools to support their employees. We will demonstrate how professional voice technology enhances your daily work life using smartphones and a cloud-based dictation solution. Sharing case studies of law firms, insurance companies, police departments and other organizations will illustrate how speech technology is gaining acceptance among all types of professionals.

Data is king when it comes to customer engagement and is commonly captured through surveys. This session examines the best practices in survey design, provides you with a road map to improve your survey program, and teaches you how to avoid common mistakes. Learn about the survey landscape, get recommendations on what questions to ask and why, learn how to use partially completed survey data, and pick up ways to improve and measure success.

When President Barack Obama learned about the long voter lines after he was elected in 2012, he said, “We need to fix that.” This session presents VoterPass, a new system for making voting faster and easier. VoterPass is a voice- and web-based tool that allows voters to register a time to vote on Election Day.

Coventry’s quality management solution integrates customer feedback surveys and speech analytics to provide targeted, actionable insights for improvements at the customer service representative, call center, and organizational levels. Learn how these solutions resulted in fewer repeat calls, improved customer satisfaction, and a lower per-call cost.

Glass requires us to think about the user experience in a new way, and voice plays an important but poorly appreciated role in the design of good Glassware. In this session, Allen Firstenberg, Google Developer Expert for Google Glass and author of the O'Reilly book "Designing and Developing for Google Glass", discusses the most important design elements for Glass, how voice plays (or doesn't play) a role in each, and what this means for the future of wearables.

More devices are becoming connected and our homes more intelligent. As the interactions between people at home and their devices, lights, and other systems become more complicated, voice and natural language understanding (NLU) in the cloud offers a powerful way to make these systems more accessible. NLU and voice biometrics can be used to help these devices identify individual users; respond to requests in human, intuitive ways; and adapt to specific users' needs.

Mobile employees need dictation solutions that conveniently fit their schedules and environments — whether in an office, at home, or traveling. Likewise, companies need cost-effective tools to support their employees. We will demonstrate how professional voice technology enhances your daily work life using smartphones and a cloud-based dictation solution. Sharing case studies of law firms, insurance companies, police departments and other organizations will illustrate how speech technology is gaining acceptance among all types of professionals.

We have a robotic future, and the robots in that future will play roles in virtually every aspect of our lives. Currently, they range from the Roomba vacuum cleaner to Projo, a robot tutor working in schools in New York and Los Angeles. The presentation includes images and videos of real-world robots and provides an overview of speech-capable, autonomous robots in our lives today as well as ones being developed in laboratories around the world.

Many believe with the rise of wearable technology and the emergence of the Internet of Things, we are witnessing the start of the 6th wave of computing: ubiquitous computing and machine learning. Wearables and other smart devices can interact with other objects and swap information with intelligent clouds. In such a world, human-computer interactions will no longer be satisfactorily mediated by the traditional smartphone visual-tactile user interface. Voice is potentially a far more effective medium for enabling quick, real-time interactions.

Raj Tumuluri and Suresh Ganesan demonstrate how multimodal inputs such as speech, thought, gesture, face recognition, and a robotic assistant can provide patient care and wellness monitoring. After summarizing trends and lessons learned in combining EEG-headsets for thought input with speech and multimodal technology to improve outcomes in patient care, they discuss how problems encountered by their customers during deploy- ment are being evaluated.