This session discusses the recent changes in patent law and speculates on how those changes will affect the user interfaces of the future. In particular, there are new opportunities for small companies to assert intellectual property in the current environment, while the risks associated with aggressive pursuit of new applications has been significantly reduced.

Conversational interfaces provide an opportunity to create experiences that are much easier to use than existing accessible technologies. We demonstrate a fully conversational shopping client, SayShopping, and discuss the opportunities for voice-based technologies in the accessibility industry. Seewww.youtube.com/watch?v=gOMj-1ssueIfor a preview.

What do clients really mean by “It just doesn’t work”? How, as voice interaction designers, can we interpret what our clients are trying to tell us when they really can’t even explain it themselves? This session explores the top questions a voice interaction designer should be asking to get to the root of what’s really bothering our clients as well as strategies to turn this negative perception into a positive reality.

One of the world’s top experts on web-related speech standards reviews the state of speech standards today, the value of standards in an industry and to specific businesses, ways to use standards development to your advantage, and some areas that could be ripe for standardization.

Southwest Airlines has given the business world a textbook example of how providing fabulous customer service and maintaining high employee morale in a low-cost environment is possible and even profitable in corporate America today. But what’s the real story? As a key developer of Southwest Airlines’ legendary customer service and leadership training programs, Jason Young knows that great culture does not “just happen.” A customer service value can be created and nurtured to flourish into a customer service culture. Employees can be treated as true partners in the success of the business through shared values, shared vision, and shared efforts. Young shares the inside story behind the success of Southwest, consistently rated No. 1 in customer service and employee satisfaction. Best of all, learn how to take these proven organizational principles to your team or company. You won’t want to miss this inside edition from the man who knows it best.

This session presents an overview of the recently released “Dimension Data Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report,” designed to provide a single point of reference on key aspects affecting customer management within today’s contact centers. This year’s results demonstrate how businesses grapple with balancing the integration of complex systems and processes while ensuring excellent customer experience. We share our findings, discuss industry trends, and provide business decision makers with actionable information.

The vision of speech recognition can sometimes exceed the reality. Applications such as Siri and Google Now have both client organizations and end users excited about speech, but also help to raise the bar for speech-based IVRs. Delivering a world-class application is about more than building the application. Learn how to exceed expectations by addressing assumptions early on, defining success criteria, and successfully executing a rollout plan.

The 20th anniversary of SpeechTEK is a good opportunity to reflect on how far speech technologies have come—and what has potentially been lost along the way. This presentation explores how the mad dash to go digital has caused many customer experience professionals to take their eyes off the IVR and what this means to the customer experience. It also offers suggestions on how to turn disjointed interactions into satisfying customer journeys.

Panelists in this session explore the use of leading-edge mathematical and cognitive research techniques to automate analytic processes and eventually produce machine-driven, highly accurate prediction models. Learn how machine learning techniques may be used to drive the mass customization of ASR language models to provide a fast and inexpensive method of leveraging speech recognition to index phone calls, providing precise information for optimizing the delivery of call center services.

Panelists discuss two different drivers for the need for secure audio data: mobile advertising and global investigations. Panelists discuss improvements to today’s unsecure methods for storing call recordings and sending calls to untrusted third-party vendors which are required for mobile advertising analytics. They also demonstrate new technologies and methods for streamlining and improving the accuracy of identifying relevant spoken audio in response to global regulatory and criminal investigations.

While upgrading its system to include speech analytics, SMEC learned several important lessons that Tana Hill shares with attendees. For example, it’s important to be diligent in conducting call studies at least once a quarter and doing deep dives in between to see your ROI for the product as well as the cost savings for your company. Attendees also learn why it’s important to have a full-time employee and proper backup in the event of a server failure. If you’re thinking of leveraging speech analytics for your organization, this session is for you.

Natural language understanding has clearly improved the IVR experience, but if you can do it, nothing is easier for callers than a yes/no question. This talk reviews several cases in which speech vendors need to make tough calls about whether to sell the coolest technologies or solve problems the old-fashioned way. Author Jared Diamond noted, “Invention is the mother of necessity.” We as responsible speech vendors cannot fall prey to that problem and need to deploy new technologies responsibly.

Challenge questions are used to provide the “what you know” factor of a multifactor authentication strategy and are used by contact center agents to verify the identity of callers. Automating challenge dialogues would increase self-service rates and pave the way for adding voice biometrics as a second authentication factor. Typically IVR challenge dialogues tend to perform poorly compared to human agents, but this talk presents a novel approach for implementing IVR challenge dialogues that can achieve far greater automation rates.

The 20th anniversary of SpeechTEK is a good opportunity to reflect on how far speech technologies have come—and what has potentially been lost along the way. This presentation explores how the mad dash to go digital has caused many customer experience professionals to take their eyes off the IVR and what this means to the customer experience. It also offers suggestions on how to turn disjointed interactions into satisfying customer journeys.

Many contact centers focus on first-call resolution as a primary metric of customer satisfaction and agent effectiveness. A mature contact center approach must also include a strategy for next-contact avoidance (NCA), anticipating and resolving the customer’s next potential issue, thereby reducing inbound contacts. In this session, we discuss the factors involved in developing an NCA strategy, including quality back-end data, cross-channel integration, a robust agent desktop, and a process for identifying and reinforcing desired agent behavior.

There are so many ways to measure the performance of and customer satisfaction with speech applications, it’s mind-boggling to make sense of it all. Is containment more important than first-call resolution? Should we care more about Net Promoter Score or comments on social media? Panelists in this session give solid guidance on the strengths and limitations of various methods of measurements and evaluation, understanding which method is appropriate for the question you’re asking, and how to properly constrain the conclusions you make based on available data.

Learn how the Orlando Utilities Commission optimizes its voice integration system to better serve its utility customers. The session highlights the techniques, processes, and procedures used to continuously improve the speech system. In addition, it illustrates the importance of reporting analytics, high-level speech tuning, and quantifying results of incremental changes. Attend this session to learn how to optimize your voice interaction system by leveraging practical techniques and processes.

The vision of omnichannel interactions is being realized here and now, but what is the role of the traditional IVR in this vision? The goal is to treat all channels consistently and allow users to move among them seamlessly. We suggest that IVR’s unique characteristics enable it to be pivotal in successful omnichannel journeys. Join this session to hear about three commercially successful use cases that illustrate the role of IVR in the omnichannel experience.

The technology that enables us to communicate is developing faster than the applications that would harness it. With access to multiple inexpensive audio, video, and communications technologies, combined with ubiquitous connectivity and pocket-sized devices, the stage is set for a renaissance in the way we communicate in real time. This presentation analyzes real-world examples in terms of the problems they are designed to solve, the unique usability challenges presented, and the opportunities to improve them further.

The 20th anniversary of SpeechTEK is a good opportunity to reflect on how far speech technologies have come—and what has potentially been lost along the way. This presentation explores how the mad dash to go digital has caused many customer experience professionals to take their eyes off the IVR and what this means to the customer experience. It also offers suggestions on how to turn disjointed interactions into satisfying customer journeys.

A smooth hand over between channels such as mobile apps, IVRs, or websites, as well as when switching from self-to live-service, is crucial to providing excellent customer service. To do so, companies need an easily accessible data store that can memorize past transactions on any channel using “context cookies”—small traces of information about the journey of a customer. This session introduces the “experience continuity” concept, describes an architecture of a continuity server as a home for context cookies, and gives examples of how cookies can improve the customer experience across customer care channels.

Consumers expect information to be readily available no matter what channel they choose, and companies have provided access to this information via IVR, web, mobile apps, email, SMS, chat and in-person with live agents. The goal is a seamless experience for customers no matter which channel they select or how they move among channels. Panelists in this session critically examine how successful companies have been at providing a cohesive omnichannel experience, detail examples of broken experiences, and explore strategies for improvement.

Despite the increasingly widespread use of speech technology, in everyday life, there continues to be great skepticism about this technology for use in broadcast media. Learn how ASR, machine learning, and machine translation techniques are used for closed captioning and subtitling, producing results that challenge manual approaches. The presentation uses case study data from AppTek’s work using speech technology with the Middle East Broadcast Corporation’s Al Arabiya News.

Mobile transactions almost doubled last year, accounting for 17% of total purchases made in North America. But about 60% of the malware targeted toward Android devices was aimed primarily at stealing banking details or money. Mobile payment companies are looking to voice biometrics as a viable solution. This session discusses how those companies are including voice biometrics into their mobile payment ecosystem, and what their customers are saying about the experience.

Voice biometrics is one of the fastest growing technologies for providing security of personal data access and communication. How does voice biometrics work? Is it easy to implement? How will customers use voice biometrics to access and communicate personal data? How will voice biometrics affect call center performance? Learn how a consumer health insurance organization solved these problems to provide a secure and trusted system.

The 20th anniversary of SpeechTEK is a good opportunity to reflect on how far speech technologies have come—and what has potentially been lost along the way. This presentation explores how the mad dash to go digital has caused many customer experience professionals to take their eyes off the IVR and what this means to the customer experience. It also offers suggestions on how to turn disjointed interactions into satisfying customer journeys.

Smartphones enable multiple techniques for biometric authentication. This presentation explores the future of account login on mobile platforms through various combinations of voice and face biometrics, including SpeechPro’s deployment of a voice+face biometric solution at Wells Fargo and the newest generation of password-fighting solutions: Voice.Swipe, which combines voice biometric and visual UI clues known to a specific user.

The growing use of smartphones has completely recast the role of IVR-based self-service. To provide customers with immediate, effortless fulfillment of their goals, we must provide solutions that combine accurate speech recognition, realtime analytics, and rapid authentication that include voice biometrics. Learn about recent research results regarding technological solutions that enable customers to use their channel of choice and device of choice to accomplish everyday goals.

The USAA team was looking for a simple, personalized experience for its members. This talk tells the story of that journey, from a reactive IVR to a proactive/personalized experience. It covers what was more complex than expected and what was simpler than expected. We share results of the new personalized IVR and the pivots we took along the way.