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. ☺
MacSpeech, a supplier of speech recognition software for the Mac, has canned its long-running iListen product and has launched a Mac version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the Windows speech recognition product. MacSpeech has made a licensing agreement with Dragon's developer, Nuance Communications. The new product is said to reach 99% accuracy after 5 minutes of training. [click heading for more]
Companies are beginning to see the technology as an essential part of customer service strategy.
Speech self-service is quickly becoming an essential application for any organization interested in delivering the best customer service possible. In fact, the technology ranks as the top strategic action in 2008 for companies considered Best-in-Class, according to a new benchmark study of more than 300 companies by Aberdeen Research.
Alan Hubbard, senior vice president of Aberdeen's customer support practice, and a co-author of the report entitled "Speech Self-Service: Say 'Yes' to Reduce Costs and Improve Customer Satisfaction," says a portion of the end-user feedback surprised him. "We knew going into this that the overall implementation of speech self-service was low," he explains. "We had seen in previous surveys it was in the 3 to 10 percent range of companies that actually installed it." Among the Best-in-Class companies over the next 12 to 24 months, however, "upwards of 30 percent will implement some form of speech self-service." [click heading for more]
Resolvity, Inc. announced recently that its Speech Application Platform has received a 2007 Product of the Year Award from Technology Marketing Corporation’s (TMC) Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, the leading publication covering CRM, call centers and teleservices. Commitment to the industry's technological advancement, improvement in customer experience, were some of the criteria that led to the award.
Resolvity’s intelligent voice automation solutions help companies automate their customer support phone calls, thereby improving service levels and customer satisfaction while lowering support costs. These solutions are built on Resolvity’s Speech Application Platform. The platform consists of a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence runtime, a state-of-the-art Dialog Server, a framework for seamless integration with other call center systems, and extensive management reporting.
The platform has been designed with a focus towards developing solutions that are complex from a customer interaction standpoint and that require frequent “near real-time” modifications to respond to constantly changing business requirements.[click heading for more]
Review: Microsoft's VOIP system for SMBs boasts a few glitzy next-generation features that make the system incredibly easy to use, and comes in an appliance form factor that makes the system a snap to deploy.
Each Response Point phone has a blue Response Point button which, when pressed, allows the user to place calls (internal or external), check voice mail, or park, transfer or conference calls by verbally telling the system what to do. It's a stunning use of speech recognition technology that is brain dead simple to learn.
Additionally, the system can be used to answer certain common real language questions automatically. For instance, Response Point will tell incoming callers the office hours, whether they ask "What are your hours?" or "What time are you open?" or numerous other variations of that and a couple other questions. [click heading for more]
It wouldn't be right for me not to comment on Bill Gates' farewell speech at CES this week. In particular, this little snippet from The Telegraph amused me...
Has software genius Bill Gates run out of gadgets to announce?
It's almost exactly a year since the Microsoft founder last made a high-profile speech about how television and the internet are merging, and he was droning on about it again yesterday during his address to the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.He also used the platform there to explain how Microsoft is expanding the capability of its software to incorporate lots of fancy stuff such as voice recognition.
Oh, come on Bill! Haven't we also heard that one before? Here is the Gates technology vision back in October 1997: "In this 10-year time frame," he said then, "I believe that we'll not only be using the keyboard and the mouse to interact but, during that time, we will have perfected speech recognition and speech output well enough that those will become a standard part of the interface."
Garmin International today unveiled a new portable navigator with speech recognition, allowing users to get travel directions by simply asking for them.
The nuvi 880 is Garmin’s first Global Positioning System device with speech recognition. Garmin contends the device works straight out of the box without “training” the navigator to recognize voice commands. [click heading for more]
Nokia Siemens Networks has announced that it has been awarded a pan-India contract from Bharti Airtel Limited for the deployment of a single Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform across all 23 circles. With the new IVR solution, Airtel will be able to deliver such services as Voice SMS, Televoting, Call Management Services (Reach-me service/Missed Call Advisor), Caller Ring Back Tone (CRBT) and Voice Portal. [click heading for more]
According to a presentation at the 93rd Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of America, the implementation of speech recognition software in a radiology physician practice generates fewer errors than traditional transcription methods. [click heading for more]
Today Voxeo Corporation announced the general availability of Voxeo Designer 8, the rapid, web-native voice application development tool. Designer has been available to Voxeo premise customers since the debut of the Prophecy 8 platform in August, and is now also available to Voxeo hosting customers. Designer 8 incorporates a new Web 2.0 interface that leverages AJAX for a significant user-interface improvement over previous versions. [click heading for more]
Interactive voice response (IVR) systems can cause a strong improvement in customer experience and contact center operating costs like few other customer-care technologies can. Speech-enabled IVRs have the ability to pick up where their dual-tone or touch-tone multifrequency counterparts leave off. But this doesn't necessarily make it an all-purpose cure-all. Rather, when speech technologies come into play, the design of the system is that much more important. Voice user interface design is a top obstacle to higher rates of satisfaction.
Designing a speech-enabled IVR can be complicated. The following are seven proven strategies to aid in the transition to speech-recognition IVR technology. [click heading for more]
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