With a greater quantity of infotainment flowing to the vehicle, the solution to reducing driver distraction likely resides in combining a variety of driver interfaces to fit specific tasks. This presentation describes a multimodal user interface that leverages speech and a haptic controller that is better-suited for tasks that require simple user interaction. We demonstrate an interface in which visual information is presented in the form of iconic tiles that enable content discovery and selection with minimal visual dependency.

As user demand scales for intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana, we are approaching the computational limits of current datacenter architectures. In this presentation, we present the design of Sirius, an open end-to-end IPA web-service application that accepts queries in the form of voice and images, and responds with natural language. We describe how we used Sirius to evaluate future accelerator-based server architectures.

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.

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.

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.

Attend this panel for a discussion of the vital role of voice interaction design in a variety of healthcare applications. The healthcare domain presents unique challenges in terms of confidentiality, persuading individuals to change behaviors, and users who may have physical or mental impairments. Healthcare experiences must not only be effective but show sensitivity to users’ anxiety over an upcoming procedure, fear and denial regarding a recent diagnosis, or confusion over a complicated new medication regime.

There are some excellent tools on the market for creating your own virtual assistant; most are intended for corporate customers with large budgets. But there are also freely available open source tools that enable developers with some background in software development to create their own virtual assistants. We examine, show demos and videos, and compare currently available open source tools including the JiboAlive Toolkit, Virtual Human Toolkit, Teneo Studio, CMU’s Jasper for Raspberry Pi, Speaktoit, and Pandorabot.

Written text is permanent, while spoken text is transient. Visual IVR offers users a visual representation of their IVR menus that can greatly improve the IVR experience. Can you add visual IVR capability to your existing voice-only IVR infrastructure to leverage your existing IVR call flows, help keep custom- er service cost down, and extend the life of your legacy IVR investments? What are the similarities and differences among the various approaches to visual IVR?