The field of intellectual property is rapidly evolving, both with respect to the law and the technologies being considered for protection. This session provides a primer about what a patent is, current best practices for protecting speech technologies and defending against assertion, and the recent evolution of intellectual property law in the United States, with emphasis on speech, software user interfaces, and mobile technologies.

Fraudsters are using robodialing and ANI spoofing to wreak havoc on call centers. From the illegal practice of toll-free traffic pumping and international revenue-sharing fraud, to the more villainous acts of financial account fraud, identity theft, and drug trafficking, this seminar explores the unusual ways criminals are hacking our businesses. We also examine simple and cost-effective practices to protect our businesses, and our customers.

Visual IVR applications are like voice-only applications with a visual component. Some practitioners feel this makes IVR applications faster and more usable, while others feel the visual IVR limits the dialogue style. This open conversation discusses what visual IVR entails, as well as its advantages and disadvantages.

Some practitioners believe that grammar-based dialogues limit the user in what words and phrases the user can speak. Other practitioners believe that statistical language models (SLMs) are too expensive and complicated. Learn how a large credit union was able to use grammar-based directed dialogues in lieu of SLMs to improve customer experiences in transactions about checking balances, checking interest rates, and password resets. Share experiences and options about the relative advantages and disadvantages of grammars and SLMs.

World-class customer service is not simply a matter of smiling employees who say “please” and “thank you.” Everything your customer sees, hears, or touches impacts user experience. “Everything speaks.” This keynote highlights how delivering world-class service requires careful orchestration of the entire customer experience. Attendees discover the key points of contact that make or break the customer experience; how to elevate the customer experience from ordinary to extraordinary; and customer service processes that make service excellence “business as usual.”

The Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report provides a comprehensive global overview of the state of multichannel interactions and customer relationship management in contact centers. This comprehensive report is designed to provide a single point of reference on key aspects affecting customer experience and service in today’s contact centers. Join us for a review of what’s changing in contact centers and learn how to incorporate recent successes to improve your contact center.

Contact centers are experiencing a shift in the role they play among consumers. This interactive session invites you to share your stories of where this shift is evident for your organization. We delve into the reasons this shift is happening, and explore the effect it has on customer experience. Discuss the indicators of this phenomenon and share approaches that project teams can take to optimize the experience from the design and business perspectives.

Changes in technologies and communications across devices bring new opportunities and challenges to the process of designing great voice user experiences. The widespread adoption of mobile devices, data-driven personalization and hyperpersonalization, the growth of CRM and unified communications, speech recognition across a broad range of devices, and cloud technologies have significantly changed the landscape. This presentation discusses the implication for effective process, tools, and design strategies with examples from live deployments.

How has the changing role of IVR played out for financial services organizations? Panelists discuss the impact of omnichannel communications, evidence of changes in customer expectations, and the resulting changes in customer behavior for the IVRs deployed at their organizations. Learn their analyses of the current state of IVRs and consider options for future changes in IVRs for the financial services industry.

The vision of omnichannel environments is more than creating experiences for consumers across all channels. It is also about unifying the digital and the voice worlds across disparate technology stacks. The greater omnichannel vision can be achieved by leveraging technology and operational tools across digital and voice organizations. Learn how to facilitate building real experiences that span current and new channels and leverage unified business logic and application flow frameworks.

See presentations about some of the latest technological developments in speech technology from companies at the conference. Solution Sessions are open to all full conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders. 

Accelerate your innovation to deliver flawless CX across digital customer service channels. Join Bill Aston, Cyara General Manager and Vice President, as he discusses the Customer Experience Innovation Lifecycle (CXIL). Learn how CXIL can save significant costs when undertaking major projects that transform your businesses. Gain fresh insights on the performance of your CX ecosystem to extract greater value from your investments in technology and processes.

The graphical user interface (GUI) revolutionized computing, making the power of digital systems and the internet available to a nontechnical user. The GUI, however, is becoming overburdened and difficult to use, particularly on smaller mobile devices. The language user interface (LUI) can overcome this hurdle to usability, both alone and as a supplement to the GUI. It allows using our natural language with the simple user manual: “Just say what you want.”

With far field technologies finally getting to market-ready pricing, we're about to see a large proliferation of environment based voice interactive. Soon, even through noise and multiple speakers, we'll be able to interact in our home through appliances and specialized devices. But what happens next? This talk will focus on the next integrations to enhance voice-based interaction - emotion, context, and sound identification - and how this will shape interaction with our home.

In a few years, there will be millions of connected devices. Homeowners will be able to remotely monitor and control appliances, security systems, garage doors, environmental and entertainment systems, and more. Industrial systems will contain sensors and actuators for monitoring controlling industrial processes. How will users manage all these devices? Will it be through large screens, mobile devices, or far-field microphones embedded into our surroundings? How will the devices be organized so that a homeowner can open his own garage door and not his neighbor’s?

The emerging Internet of Things will accelerate the use of voice as a primary interface modality. The Interface to the Internet of Things clearly needs to handle hands-eyes use cases as well as devices without screens, but it must also be Multi-Person, Multi-Device and Cross-Device. Equally clearly, the interface must be proactive, personalized and intelligent. This talk will outline the architecture of the emerging interface, including the component technologies other than voice and how they will work together to address the needs of the Internet of Things.

This panel identifies opportunities for new services enabled by voice and the Internet of Things. Examples include new medical services that locate patients with dementia who wear a GPS-enabled monitor or remind patients to take their medicine located in a smart pillbox and devices that schedule home visits based on remote sensing of the condition of appliances, such as air conditioning and heating.

See presentations about some of the latest technological developments in speech technology from companies at the conference. Solution Sessions are open to all full conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders. 

Intelligent Virtual Assistants will revolutionize how consumers interact with systems and devices and will improve customer care or enable a connected home. Join Phil Gray, EVP Business Strategy as he discusses the key attributes of next generation intelligent assistants, how intelligent virtual assistants will impact both businesses and consumers, and the core technologies such as machine learning and neural networks that are driving the revolution.

After a short overview of intelligent assistants designed to foster shared understanding and terminology for core technologies, products, and services, this session discusses the future of intelligent assistants. How do natural language processing, machine learning, semantic understanding, and other programming tricks from artificial intelligence improve understanding? What are the implications for self-service and assisted self-service? What ongoing roles are left for humans? How will mobile personal assistants (such as Apple’s Siri or Nuance’s Nina) speak to domain-specific enterprise intelligent assistants?

To assess attitudes about voice-driven natural language technology, MindMeld studied 1,800 smartphone users to assess patterns in adoption, use frequency, and satisfiers and dissatisfiers of smartphone voice assistants. We also studied the demographics and technology habits of voice assistant users, as leading indicators of attitudes and interest in voice in general. Our presentation summarizes insights from our research, accompanied by graphs and discussion about what this means for the speech industry.

We’re now entering the “Age of Context,” where our users interact in frequently interrupted patterns, perpetually moving around and interacting with their environment using on-board sensors. This talk explores this evolution and proposes new techniques to facilitate designing for context, taking into account the needs of the new mobile, multichannel, and virtual-assistant aware generation.

Much of what we do in the real world involves conversational interaction with human specialists ranging from food servers to bank clerks to medical professionals. While virtual assistants such as Siri enable consumers to reach a service, they do not help consumers to perform tasks in the service. Bill Mark describes and discusses “virtual specialists,” a new type of virtual assistant that helps consumers perform tasks that require deep knowledge of the service and of the consumer’s personal relationship with that service.

Natural language understanding has become the latest hype with the promise of conversational interactions with virtual personal assistants. Natural language understanding covers a vast range of technologies. Which approaches are relevant for virtual personal assistants? Learn natural language understanding techniques and tricks being applied in today’s virtual personal assistants on platforms such as Api.ai, Wit.ai, Amazon Alexa, Google Voice Actions, and others. Learn how these platforms extract user intent from free-form user requests.

See presentations about some of the latest technological developments in speech technology from companies at the conference. Solution Sessions are open to all full conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders. 

eCommerce changed our lives tremendously but until now voice was absent. With the vision of creating the fastest interface for ordering goods and services, Apptek started the Digital Voice Agent DIVA. Users can interact via voice with a visual eCommerce application to search, browse and buy products.

Adapting an application to a new language and culture presents many challenges. Learn about the constraints of automatic translation of text-to-speech and the dangers of using dynamic data in messages presented to the user. Real-world examples in this session explain how to avoid inaccurate translations of gender, number, grammatical case, and other problem areas. Learn how to automatically translate ASR grammars.

In an increasingly global marketplace, VUI designers are facing the need to localize their designs for other languages. Localization involves much more than just translation; it requires the consideration of cultural appropriateness, intelligibility, conversational norms, persona design, and brand representation in the target locale. How does a U.S.-based, English-speaking designer create an application for the best user experience in other locales? How does a specialist with expertise in the local culture partner with a VUI designer to create an appropriate user experience?

A combination of multiple factors—such as something you know (challenge dialogues, pass codes, and phrases), something you have (passports, driver licenses, keycards, badges), and something about you (voice and facial characteristics)—enable the best prevention against cyber-fraud. Innovative security techniques include tests for “liveness” to ensure users are not robots or simulations, comparison of users to a database of known fraudsters, and vision techniques to detect documentation forgery. Learn how to use available technology to secure your information and systems.

In addition to using multiple factors to authenticate users, new techniques provide additional security. Active voice authentication consists of two modes: unlock mode to gain initial access, and continuous monitor mode to verify the user remains present. Multichannel authentication validates the user as the user switches among multiple channels. See live demos and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of various implementation models.

This session reviews the current state of the market. Identify the major software vendors providing customer-identity authentication solutions and technology. Summarize results of Hypatia Research Group’s global survey focused on customer identity authentication. Determine issues to consider in the purchase and deployment of customer identification authentication technology. Analyze performance metrics and return on investment assessments. Discuss how to conduct benchmarks in omnichannel customer systems.

See presentations about some of the latest technological developments in speech technology from companies at the conference. Solution Sessions are open to all full conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders. 

Today’s globalized business environment forces companies to differentiate from competitors not only on what it is sold to customers but also the relation maintained with them. But his is not the only challenge companies must face, consumers are also changing. Younger generation demands a different relationship with the organizations, asking for channel freedom and immediacy. On this new reality, there is now more pressure for any business to deliver a better Customer Experience. However, it might be difficult to manage a consistent multi-channel relationship with customers in Contact Center. We will detail 5 strategies any company should implement when attempting to deliver a World-class Customer Experience.

Join your peers as we celebrate the grand opening of the Customer Solutions Expo. Visit with conference sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and other attendees while enjoying light hors d’oeuvres and drinks. Admittance is included with your full conference pass purchase.