Speech Within Your Reach

If you manage a contact center, chances are good you have experience in offering some sort of self service to customers: an IVR, or a Web site with an FAQ list, perhaps. You know why self-service is good: It automates the basic issues customers have that may take up a large portion of your expensive live agents’ time, like balance inquiries and transfers for a bank, outage and billing information for a utility, store hours and stock availabilities for a retail store, price checks in the case of a b-to-b situation.

Enter speech-enabled customer self service. There is some evidence that customers actually like using speech for navigation and self service. There are no buttons to push, most systems allow “barge in” (so customers don’t have to wait for the end of a prompt), and speech systems are “smarter” and can allow for more ambiguous input, in the case of more advanced speech recognition.[click heading for more]

Making the connection

Touch and voice activation is making the control of machinery ever more sophisticated. Steve Rogerson looks at just how far we have come.

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What is VoiceXML?

VoiceXML (VXML) is the W3C's standard XML format for specifying interactive voice dialogues between a human and a computer. It is fully analogous to HTML, and brings the same advantages of web application development and deployment to voice applications that HTML brings to visual applications. Just as HTML documents are interpreted by a visual web browser, VoiceXML documents are interpreted by a voice browser. A common architecture is to deploy banks of voice browsers attached to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) so that users can simply pick up a phone to interact with voice applications. [click heading for more]

The first post

Welcome to "I Talk Speech" (I think in my mind that's meant to be "iTalk Speech"), and thank you for dropping by.

For quite some time during my previous employment I was running and maintaining a library on the corporate intranet of snippets and tidbits of what was going on in the speech industry. Actually, it was a really useful resource. Whenever there was a business case or market requirements document to prepare, nearly all the data and information was at your fingertips in one place. I have this sinking feeling, though, that I was the only one that read it.

Now that I have moved on, I've decided that I should try and do something similar - moving to a blog format to perhaps engage more readers and promote interaction and discussion. A single place you can come to to find out what's moving-and-shaking in the speech technology industry. A smattering of News, View and Reviews.

I don't know if it will work, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

If you'd like to provide feedback on how this resource could develop and be improved, please feel free to do so, as kindly as possible.

cheers,

Nik