Aimed at attendees new to speech technologies, this workshop overviews speech recognition technologies. Starting with describing the basic fundamentals, the workshop will summarise the pros and cons of available speech recognition technologies, explain when and where to use speech recognition (and when not to), and identify best practices for designing dialogues using the latest speech technologies. The workshop will culminate with a practical demonstration of rapid-applicationdevelopment of a speech-enabled Interactive Voice Response application.

Targeted at anyone with responsibility for the design of customer service applications including business analysts, decision makers, and user interface designers, this introductory tutorial will be illustrated with video clips. You will learn how to:

• Apply the principles of ergonomics including human memory and attention
• Leverage the strengths of speech recognition technology and compensate for its weaknesses
• Plan and structure your application from the user’s point of view
• How to write dialogue scripts enabling customers to achieve goals easily and quickly
• When to use various types of recognition technology

There is a variety of choices for speech recognition engines, especially for languages other than English.  Although many companies are comfortable performing business case analyses across speech recognition engine vendors, it is often difficult to know how to compare accuracy. In this hands-on, in-depth course you will learn how to select an appropriate evaluation data set, why transcription is important and how to do it properly, how to
perform the evaluation, and how to analyse and interpret the results.

The European market place is multilanguage. In today’s global village the need to support multilanguage systems is a basic requirement, yet designing multilanguage speech systems is not an easy task. This workshop addresses how to design speech systems serving multiple languages and cultures and is divided into a series of mini lectures, each followed by a supporting exercise. Topics addressed include:

• The various kinds of multilanguage systems and their advantages and disadvantages
• The main challenges for multilanguage systems and how to overcome them
• How to identify what language(s) the caller is using
• How to modify a basic dialogue to address the user’s language and culture
• Major do’s, don’ts and best practices