Charlie Leadbeater describes the new phenomenon of creativity driven by social media, and explores ways in which passionate, knowledgeable consumers can generate mass creative collaboration. Before we explore the detail of voice and speech applications, this thoughtprovoking keynote will underline the importance of customer relationships, and of capitalising on communication channels with your customers.

Charlie Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and strategy. He has advised companies, cities and governments. He is a special adviser on Competitiveness and the New Economy to the European Commission, and is reportedly former Prime Minister Tony Blair's favourite corporate thinker. We-think, his latest book, charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation.

This session presents two birds’ eye views of the pros and cons of entering new markets. Darla Tucker describes how self service automation has become a vehicle for achieving reduced cost while providing a solid ROI, and how cultural differences drive a need for differentiation among multiple language deployments. Julia Khitrova explores the challenges of first deployments in the new regional IVR market – Russia. Hear how to overcome the distrust in ASR performance, concerns about the expense of voice-enabled deployments, and how to overcome the peculiarities of synthesising and recognising a local language.

The Customer Experience Foundation reports that UK contact centres fail to measure the customer and business impact of technology failures.  Trevor Richer and Morris Pentel’s presentation identifies what can be done to minimise this problem. Annabelle Goymer describes Transport for London’s experiences with automated voice technology applications that assist customers to make over 24 million trips a day and shares experiences to help you improve your own voice technology applications.

Learn how to avoid disputes between customer employees and VUI designers by pinpointing common pitfalls in the communication between them, and identify ways to resolve conflicts with and disagreements between application designers and implementers. Crafting good error-handling prompts is a key part in the overall success of IVR self-service applications. Discover two alternative strategies for crafting error-handling prompts, as well as the pros and cons of each approach.

Key management decisions include whether speech applications should be hosted on premise or offsite by a hosting company, and how to embrace unified communications within the enterprise. John Amein explains the advantages and disadvantages of hosted and on premise solutions. Detlev Artelt describes how unified communications will change the enterprise IT structure and affect the development and deployment of speech technology applications, how the various  channels of electronic communication are integrated and what this means to an enterprise.

Experienced analysts provide their insights about speech deployments in Europe. Dimension Data’s Alignment Index for Speech Self-Service survey compares and measures consumer, vendor and enterprise perceptions of speech systems. The survey identifies differences in perceptions, tracks levels of alignment among the three constituent groups over time, and compares global consumer behaviours and attitudes to speech solutions. Ovum provides insight into the types of speech applications being deployed today and the timeframes for realising ROI.

Help us celebrate the launch of SpeechTEK Europe at our inaugural networking reception! Join us for informal drinks and business networking with your speech industry peers from around the world.

Charlie Leadbeater describes the new phenomenon of creativity driven by social media, and explores ways in which passionate, knowledgeable consumers can generate mass creative collaboration. Before we explore the detail of voice and speech applications, this thoughtprovoking keynote will underline the importance of customer relationships, and of capitalising on communication channels with your customers.

Charlie Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and strategy. He has advised companies, cities and governments. He is a special adviser on Competitiveness and the New Economy to the European Commission, and is reportedly former Prime Minister Tony Blair's favourite corporate thinker. We-think, his latest book, charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation.

Voice alone can only tell customers about a service, product, or repair strategy. Video shows them! Hear how two of Europe’s leading organisations have successfully added video into their existing speech applications to deliver new levels of customer experience. Learn how video self-service in mobile banking, interactive advertising, and airline check-in offer substantial cost savings and improved customer care. Hear the experiences of an interactive voice and video response (IVVR) that offers video calling-based customer care to 8.5 million customers.

Voice biometric systems identify speakers and verify that speakers are who they claim to be, thereby minimising fraud and theft. Learn how to evaluate these systems using a clear step-by-step evaluation methodology based on best practices. Jim Cook’s presentation further illustrates the capabilities of voice biometrics, with a case study
demonstrating how voice biometrics can be used to replace cumbersome and time-consuming handwritten signatures on physical documents with an electronic signature linking the transaction to the person doing the signing.

Learn what multimodal mashups are, why they are popular, and how speech recognition technologies are available to mashups. This fast-paced session will be full of practical examples to help you discover how easy it is to create mashups that use speech. Then learn about an open standards-based approach for deploying multimodal applications on a variety of mobile devices to seamlessly leverage sensory and other on-device peripherals. See the convenience of speech, touch/tap,location, and gesture input for practical multimodal applications.

Multinational organisations and countries and regions with many cultures require multilingual applications. This session gives you a bird’s eye view of how to design, implement, and test multilingual applications, with video clips of usability studies from Europe, the USA and emerging markets in Africa. Topics include how to use standard languages to develop multilingual speech applications, how to conduct usability tests in multiple languages, and how to deal with crosscultural attitudes about IVR and speech systems.

This session introduces three new, powerful languages from the W3C for developing speech applications:

• Speech Synthesis Markup Language 1.0 (SSML 1.1) now provides better support for a broader set of natural (human) languages;
• Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS 1.0) enables interoperable specifications of pronunciation information for both speech synthesis and speech recognition engines; and
• State Chart XML (SCXML) is a general-purpose event-based state machine language used to model both voice only and multimodal dialogues.

Help us celebrate the launch of SpeechTEK Europe at our inaugural networking reception! Join us for informal drinks and business networking with your speech industry peers from around the world.