www.getdesign.in - My periodic blog exploring the world of business, experience design and interaction, with a smattering of gadgetry and social media. A world where business, people and technology meet.
Let's Fix Things: For over two decades I've been consulting in Communications Design: Everything from business strategy and processes, through to technology, interaction and customer experience. The thoughts here are my own, not necessarily that of my employer.
I have a penchant for spotting patterns and fixing broken user and customer experiences. Even my Bumblebee project hasn't escaped - I've been using Six Sigma techniques to study and predict their behaviour patterns. ☺
In the first month since the installation, overall talk times for Stream Energy agents have decreased by nearly 30%, 25% of customers have shown a preference for using the new self-service options, and almost 90% of customers using the call-back feature are finding it meets their needs. [click heading for more]
Channel Four has been fined £1.5m by media watchdog Ofcom for misconduct involving phone-in competitions on Richard and Judy and Deal or No Deal.
Viewers were urged to call a premium number after contestants had already been chosen on Richard and Judy.
Deal or No Deal selected competition finalists in a way which gave later entrants less chance of winning.
Eckoh UK, the company which ran Richard and Judy's You Say, We Pay phone-in, has already been fined £150,000. [click heading for more]
AT&T Wireless announced today it has partnered with Barcelona, Spain based Code Factory to bring very advanced speech recognition services and highly advanced screen reader capability to AT&T Wireless phones. Code Factory's "Mobile Speak" is available for mobile phones using Symbian Operating System versions 6, 7, 8.x and 9.x running the Series 60 Edition interface; nearly all Windows Mobile Smartphones and Pocket PC's. [click heading for more]
The mobile company is using voice recognition software, much like that used in automated 411 lines and telephone bank services, with the aim being to provide a hands-free method of texting. Alltel's Voice2TXT service will utilize technology by British company Spinvox , and will provide users with the option to have voice mails sent to them as text messages. [click heading for more]
Hosted speech recognition specialist Eckoh, has sold the remaining trade and assets of its Connection Makers division to Antiphony Ltd for £1.75 million. [click heading for more]
It is a bold person who would dictate a message to anywhere public, such as a blog, without editing it first. But one area where speech recognition is very useful is dictating notes to yourself to remind you of things to do, or simply recording those random yet pertinent thoughts that occur to you during the day that might otherwise be forgotten. That would certainly change my life for the better.
I have been testing two products recently that enable you to ring a number, dictate a short message into a mobile phone and have the result emailed to you later so you don't forget. [click heading for more]
Eckoh, a provider of hosted speech recognition services, has announced a new five year contract with Twenty First Century Communications, for the delivery of automated power outage communications solutions into the UK utilities market. The solution provides callers with location specific restoration updates by identifying their exact location from their spoken post code, address and telephone number using Eckoh's ASR. Other capabilities of the solution include call back capability, designed to confirm with customers when power has been restored in their local area. [click heading for more]
reQall is a new service which allows people to record voice notes, reminders or even short conversations, and then be automatically reminded of them, search for them and recall them weeks, months or even years later. Despite its seeming simplicity, reQall is based on Vemuri's research from the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) into individual memory and "memory prosthesis". reQall deploys speech recognition software to transcribe audio data into text and then uses advanced search and retrieval tools to find a specific conversation or piece of information. The retrieval criteria can be anything from words or phrases to a date range. [click heading for more]
Frost & Sullivan presents the 2007 Global Excellence Award in speech recognition technology to Philips Speech Recognition Systems (Philips SRS), for its demonstrated leadership in the field of speech recognition technologies for the healthcare market. Decades of experience, a portfolio of 25 recognition languages and more than 150 specialised vocabularies, coupled with over 8,000 installations of its flagship product – SpeechMagic – across 50 countries, bear testimony to Philips SRS’s position. [click heading for more]
Carnegie Speech Co. has developed interactive software it says can improve English spoken-language skills by pinpointing pronunciation errors and giving suggestions as to how to correct them. The software uses speech-recognition and artificial-intelligence technology to detect errors in sound, rhythm and pitch. Users of the NativeAccent software speak into a computer microphone and then are corrected while listening to themselves and a native speaker pronounce the same words. [click heading for more]
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