IVR tuning focuses mostly on identifying speech recognition and application issues using IVR and speech recognizer logs. However, other data sources (such as customer satisfaction surveys, agent notes, and quality monitoring data) provide valuable insight into caller behavior and also explain why callers transfer out of IVR systems. Which tools and techniques do the attendees use, and how do these tools and techniques help understand caller intent and improve caller experience? Attend this session to find out.

This session examines trends affecting IVRs over the past few years and analyzes these trends to examine the future. How do mobile apps change in customer calling behavior? Will the shift toward visual user interfaces for basic customer service make traditional IVRs redundant? Will the rise of mobile apps as customer service portals cause mobile apps to suffer analogous problems as IVRs when they become the primary access mechanism into customer service? Experiences and opinions are welcome.

Voice biometrics has been attracting a growing amount of interest from consumers and solution providers. There are, however, some challenges involving voice biometrics that need additional consideration. What do survey studies reveal about the choice of a passphrase? Which guidelines for selecting passphrases are fact and which are fiction? What are the other challenges facing voice biometrics solutions? Attend this session to explore answers to these questions and others. Attendees are welcome to contribute their experiences and insights.

User interfaces for wearable computers are challenging because of their small or nonexistent display screens and small or nonexistent keyboards. Because of the impracticability of typing on these small devices, voice appears to be a useful component of wearable user interfaces. Attendees are invited to demonstrate their wearables and offer suggestions for using voice technologies to make them more useful and usable.

Social robots such as, Jibo, Honda’s ASIMO, and Hirto’s Pepper are making their way into the marketplace. What role(s) will they play in the family? What will the social impact of these robots have on family life? How will they interact with other computing facilities such as social media, business applications, games, commercial websites, and devices such as mobiles, wearables, automobiles, desktops, and laptops? How will they interact with family members of various ages, experiences, and interests? What are the social behaviors and rules they should follow? How will they formulate and present responses in a form appropriate to different family members? How will they deal with challenges such as privacy, safety, and parental control of content? What are the opportunities for new content and services enabled by social robots? Explore the future of computation and people as we move into this new frontier.

Many customers prefer text-messaging channels over IVR interactions. Interactive text response (ITR) enables dialogues with automated systems via text messages rather than voice prompts in an IVR. ITR offers the 24x7 accessibility and cost reduction value proposition of IVR, but without speech recognition challenges, dropped calls, hold time, or wading through long menus. This presentation introduces ITR, explains the technologies needed to execute the solution, and provides use cases to learn from.

This presentation explores two challenges that limit the effectiveness of current natural language implementations: the disjointed transition between initial natural language and directed dialogue prompts, and the difficulty of capturing complex intents using only one utterance. Learn how new multilayer natural language processing creates conversational experiences that go beyond the front door and can drill down to understand nonspecific user intent in a mixed initiative architecture that empowers customers.

With its groundbreaking special effects, iconic villains, and steadfast heroes, Star Wars revolutionized the film industry almost 4 decades ago. What can your business learn from this pop culture phenomenon? How can the power of omnichannel interactions rescue your IVR from the “Dark Side”? This presentation explores dynamic new technologies that let your customers enjoy screenbased interactions on their smartphones and provide continuity throughout the customer journey. Don’t miss this must-see event! (Light sabers optional.)

Real improvements in automatic speech recognition accuracy and natural language processing technologies have surfaced in the past decade, yet flawless performance is still a goal, leaving many consumers of speech technology unsatisfied. While automation is key for scale and delivery convenience for customer support and virtual assistance, it is simply not enough to ensure reliable performance. This talk discusses strategies for combining human assistance with automated service delivery paradigms to provide users with reliable speech services.

How can government organizations leverage virtual agent technologies to better deliver services and meet their mission goals? How can IT service desks be improved by using intelligent assistants and intelligent search? What capabilities are now available to enable public sector organizations to quickly and effectively voice-enable internal and external apps? How can artificial intelligence improve workforce productivity within government agencies? Example use cases include virtual agents for IT service desk support, web self-service for citizen-facing websites, and mobile apps and intelligent enterprise assistants for enhanced workforce productivity.

This presentation describes a set of tools for automatically recording the audio and video of the Italian Chamber of Deputies discussions. The audio is transcribed to text. Using a specialized editor, trained personnel edit the transcription without losing the alignment between the text and audio. Automatically generated reports (text with audio or audio-video) are immediately indexed and made available to the public (www.magnetofono.it/streaming/ archivio_storico), where users can search the transcription using meta data or full text search.

As one of the largest government call centers in the country, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) is reimagining business processes and utilizing technology to solve challenges of an ever-evolving society. Learn about how the USCIS is meeting customer demand in the digital age and gain key insights for delivering self-service in a complex environment.

Identifying IVR performance and customer experience issues is difficult because of the overwhelming volume of analytics data available to organizations. Panelists in this session discuss innovative techniques that help organizations glean insights to reduce operational costs, inform decisions about product development, reach wider markets, and yield more revenue from existing customers. Learn new methods for breaking down customer journeys into appropriate levels of granularity, identifying issues and probable causes, and prioritizing potential solutions.

Big Data analytics enables organizations to find patterns and unlock value, but it is most effective on structured data. However, an estimated 80% of available data is unstructured, so it has been virtually impossible to programmatically access insights contained in audio and video data. This session demonstrates how automated speech recognition captures and transcribes multiple languages, and gives organizations access to a deeper understanding of their customer interactions.

With its groundbreaking special effects, iconic villains, and steadfast heroes, Star Wars revolutionized the film industry almost 4 decades ago. What can your business learn from this pop culture phenomenon? How can the power of omnichannel interactions rescue your IVR from the “Dark Side”? This presentation explores dynamic new technologies that let your customers enjoy screenbased interactions on their smartphones and provide continuity throughout the customer journey. Don’t miss this must-see event! (Light sabers optional.)

Multimodal applications are filled with vulnerable micro-interactions that can make or break the user experience. This session discusses pivotal points of multimodal interactions in an omnichannel journey and how to optimize them. Learn what data is essential for identifying issues and improving user journeys, including motivations, switching modalities, and choosing the appropriate interaction model through usability studies and usage data. Learn to identify vulnerable micro-interactions and design them to be more robust.

A/B testing is a powerful tool for making design decisions that involves running controlled experiments between design options and measuring how they perform in the field. Incorporating user feedback into an A/B test allows you to include user preferences into the decision-making and even generate new design ideas. This presentation explores why to incorporate user feedback into the A/B testing process, how to construct a useful test, and what to do with the data once collected.

“Ask Julie,” an intelligent virtual assistant on Amtrak.com, was designed to function like Amtrak’s best customer service representative. Travelers book rail travel by simply stating where and when they’d like to travel. Julie assists them by prefilling forms on Amtrak’s scheduling tool and providing guidance through the rest of the booking process. Julie saves Amtrak $1 million a year in customer service email costs with 30% more revenue per booking.

To support physicians at Landmark Hospitals with long-term acute care workflow, an intelligent system with speech-enabled clinical capabilities has been deployed for testing. “Florence,” a virtual physician assistant, speeds up administrative tasks such as order placement for medication, labs, and radiology procedures. Learn about the development and clinical IQ and language understanding capabilities of Florence, as well as the ways in which the technology is applied to healthcare. See a demo of Landmark Hospital’s voice-enabled technology.

Mining thousands of transcribed calls in the search of potential tuning opportunities can be a daunting task. It is time-consuming, requires a fair bit of expertise, and lots of experience to do it effectively. Illustrated with real examples from actual projects, this talk presents a disciplined approach to speech tuning, focusing on how to find dialogue problems in an effective way using automated one-dimensional and multidimensional partitioning of utterances.

Containment is often a metric by which organizations judge IVRs to maximize and associate cost savings in the contact center. Call center managers sometimes hope to increase the number of calls contained in the IVR by tuning underperforming dialogue states, but is this a realistic expectation? Is containment even an appropriate metric? Panelists in this session discuss the potential impact of tuning on containment, explore its limitations, and reveal other data sources that can supplement tuning data for better results.

With its groundbreaking special effects, iconic villains, and steadfast heroes, Star Wars revolutionized the film industry almost 4 decades ago. What can your business learn from this pop culture phenomenon? How can the power of omnichannel interactions rescue your IVR from the “Dark Side”? This presentation explores dynamic new technologies that let your customers enjoy screenbased interactions on their smartphones and provide continuity throughout the customer journey. Don’t miss this must-see event! (Light sabers optional.)

This case study addresses innovations that were needed to optimize a set of mature natural language customer service IVRs deployed by a large U.K. financial services organization. Learn how Lloyds Bank managed the speech system to support the introduction of new products and services, communicated the power of natural language across the enterprise, and handled increased demand that arose. Understand how it set stakeholder expectations about the limitations of speech technology and kept customers happy along the way.

Voice interaction design is a rapidly evolving field that has historically been underserved by software tools that support the designer and enable process efficiencies. Panelists in this session introduce the latest design tools and explain how they can benefit your voice design. Learn about innovations that make common design tasks easier and support the design of novel conversational interfaces. Join us for demonstrations and a discussion of the best new tools for improving your voice interaction design process.

This case study discusses how Humana and Convergys worked together to deploy natural language for specific lines of business within Humana. Presenters share lessons learned from project-planning through deployment, along with critical milestones along the way. If your organization is considering, or has already deployed, natural language, this session can help you understand what you need to know about starting—and maintaining—a natural language solution.

Learn how a safety-net healthcare organization that serves underserved, uninsured, and low-income Latino families improved customer service and patient satisfaction while reducing costs, and improving population health. We replaced drawn-out, voice-only phone communications between a patient and a live staff member by shorter 'voice with visual' sessions that resulted in better understanding and compliance with health regimens.

Statistical language models (SLMs) dramatically improve vocabulary size, speed, and accuracy when used for transcribing conversational speech and responding to free-form commands. Learn how SLMs work, how they are used in products and services, and gain insight into tricks that make SLMs effective in realworld applications. See demos, case studies, and a preview of emerging SLM variations that are hierarchal (for rapid and flexible development), configurable (for adapting to specific domains), and scalable.

Lucinda (Sirius) is an open-source, end-to-end, standalone speechand vision-based intelligent personal assistant (IPA) similar to Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Echo. Lucinda implements the core functionalities of an IPA including speech recognition, image matching, natural language processing and a Q&A system. See a summary of the Lucinda technology, demonstrations, and learn of its implications for research and businesses.

With its groundbreaking special effects, iconic villains, and steadfast heroes, Star Wars revolutionized the film industry almost 4 decades ago. What can your business learn from this pop culture phenomenon? How can the power of omnichannel interactions rescue your IVR from the “Dark Side”? This presentation explores dynamic new technologies that let your customers enjoy screenbased interactions on their smartphones and provide continuity throughout the customer journey. Don’t miss this must-see event! (Light sabers optional.)

Learn how new, groundbreaking speech applications are enabled by specialized speech recognition systems.

How can you improve the end-to-end customer experience and provide superior results? In this discussion, Jason Merkoski, former director of product for Intel’s Wearables Division and an early inventor of Kindle, discusses practical lessons learned for improving accuracy and relevance from his recent startup, Be Forever Me. From open source tools to improved natural language algorithms, there are many tips and techniques you can learn to improve your own speech-powered platform.

Why did Toyota Financial Services develop multiple personas for its IVR? Learn about its process for designing and developing personas to represent the Toyota and Lexus brands in both English and Spanish, from the original research and persona design through development of the style guide and the extensive voice talent selection process. What were the challenges and pitfalls encountered? What do users think about the deployed system? Attend this session to find out the answers to these questions and more.

Follow the journey of a large-scale company taking its proof of concept pilot program into a successful, highly automated IVR program. This session highlights Pitney Bowes and Genesys’s processes and procedures in their effort to create a highly efficient and well-received customer service experience via a succession of managed deployments, tunings, assessments, and usability studies. Attend this session to learn how to collaborate successfully with IVR vendors and how to optimize a voice interaction system.