As our world becomes increasingly interdependent and globalisation brings people together more than ever, it’s no longer the ‘digital divide’ that separates us, but the ‘language divide’ and its associated cultural differences.  Using our mobile phones we could connect with everyone, if only we shared a common language and a common understanding. Yet forcing uniformity is neither realistic nor desirable. Can technology provide an answer?

Alex Waibel discusses language technology solutions that offer the best of both worlds: maintaining our cultural diversity while enabling the integration, communication and collaboration that our modern world has to offer, and presents crosslingual computer communication systems both from the University lab and start-up ventures, including:

• a computer dialogue translator on laptops for humanitarian missions and government services
  
• a iPhone pocket speech translator for tourists and doctors – using Jibbigo, the world's first commercially available speech translator running on a phone
  
• a simultaneous translation system for real time academic lectures
  
• a road sign translator that reads and translates road signs from other languages and scripts

 Accompanied by live demos, this Keynote will be simultaneously translated into Spanish by computer.

IVR management information shouldn’t be an afterthought; more than just call counts and task completion rates in IVR systems are needed by business and technical communities. Developers who have designed, built, and deployed IVR working applications describe data logging and reporting techniques used in their applications. Learn how to provide reporting of different levels for different audiences and different purposes, and how to allow for unanticipated information requests.

Customers can now interact with an organisation face-to-face, by voice email, and broadcast methods such as social media. The first presentation discusses how to create consistent personal interaction across all these channels by allowing systems to intelligently interact with one another. The second speaker presents a case study of how Deutsche Telekom customers will be able to use their mobile phone to not only access an IVR, but to also use the phone’s web browser to visually browse through the IVR.

Applications that speak and listen in more than a single language are challenging to design and implement. This session describes two multilingual applications that address these challenges. The first is a virtual doorman that supports English, Spanish, and Hebrew languages. Not only does this application use speaker identification and verification technology, it also uses face biometrics and behaviour patterns to identify the user. The second application resides on a handheld device and translates between two spoken languages.

Is IVR becoming obsolete as ‘always connected’ smartphones become the new ubiquitous communication hub? Is speech-only interaction being superseded by multimodal touch-text-talk interfaces? Can applications adapt not just to the device screen size, but to the entire delivery context, comprising location, motion, device capabilities, device-pairing, personal preferences and entitlements? Is natural language understanding the key to a new intelligent customer care self-service paradigm? Using real-life solutions this session helps you discover the answers and explores the technical challenges that must be overcome.

As our world becomes increasingly interdependent and globalisation brings people together more than ever, it’s no longer the ‘digital divide’ that separates us, but the ‘language divide’ and its associated cultural differences.  Using our mobile phones we could connect with everyone, if only we shared a common language and a common understanding. Yet forcing uniformity is neither realistic nor desirable. Can technology provide an answer?

Alex Waibel discusses language technology solutions that offer the best of both worlds: maintaining our cultural diversity while enabling the integration, communication and collaboration that our modern world has to offer, and presents crosslingual computer communication systems both from the University lab and start-up ventures, including:

• a computer dialogue translator on laptops for humanitarian missions and government services
  
• a iPhone pocket speech translator for tourists and doctors – using Jibbigo, the world's first commercially available speech translator running on a phone
  
• a simultaneous translation system for real time academic lectures
  
• a road sign translator that reads and translates road signs from other languages and scripts

 Accompanied by live demos, this Keynote will be simultaneously translated into Spanish by computer.

This session helps you get to grips with two difficult VUI design issues. Firstly, how do you measure success when different audiences may have different interpretations of what success means? Learn alternative ways to measure success and how to determine which to use for your application. Secondly, proper names are frequently difficult for speech recognition systems to correctly recognise, especially when the name is unusual or is mispronounced by the caller. Discover strategies and tactics from an expert who has deployed dozens of IVR systems in Europe.

How can our traditional user interfaces be improved using techniques developed for special audiences? Each panel member will present new and unique user interfaces developed for special needs users, explain how the user interface enables users to interact with the application, and suggest how these techniques can be applied to improve applications for non-special needs audiences. 

The first presentation will cover successful customer-centric contact centre voice deployments at several of the largest financial institutions in Australia, including the most critical aspects and experiences with application development, implementation, and change management.  The second presentation describes a bilingual system for monitoring digital media which generates in an online archive of structured information for a local government of a bilingual territory.

Advances in speech technology have enabled new applications that were previously not possible. In this session learn how to use speech technology in virtual reality systems for language training, how to create dynamic dialogues, and how to use emotion detection to monitor both callers and human agents in IVR systems. Determine how these new speech technology innovations could benefit your organisation.