Join us for a short overview of how emotions impact on speech applications, including speech synthesis, speech recognition and facial expressions. Possible discussion questions include the following:

• What are the types of emotion that would be useful to detect during speech recognition?
• How would an application respond when it detects various emotions?
• How would an application express emotions?
• How can existing applications be enhanced by emotions in speech technology?
• What new applications are enabled by emotions in speech technology?

An open meeting of the VoiceXML Forum's Speaker Biometrics Committee, which is working on extending VoiceXML to include Speaker Identification and Verification (SIV). Anyone interested in SIV is welcome to attend. Discussion topics will include an update from the VoiceXML Forum's Biometric committee followed by a Q&A.

Like playwrights, VUI designers write dialogue that is meant to be spoken out loud. Yet, recent research reveals that less than 10% of designers in the field have an educational background in voice performance, acting, coaching, voice pathology, or pedagogy. In this lively session, we will share techniques about what to look for in auditioning talent, how to write dialogue that translates well to the spoken language, and how to effectively coach a voice actor so the resulting application becomes more effective, natural, and usable.

Increasingly powerful mobile devices, along with improvements in displays and speech technologies, are making possible innovative, compelling, and robust applications that allow users to combine speech, graphics, ink, and motion. Emerging standards for multimodal interaction support and simplify the development and deployment of these applications. Please join us for a discussion of current and planned work in the World Wide Web Consortium's Multimodal Interaction Working Group and learn how to get involved in the W3C standards process.

Join us for overview of the differences between a traditional software development team and a speech application development team. Possible discussion topics will include:

• How to staff a speech application development team (e.g., hire consultants temporarily, hire new employees, or retrain existing employees)
• How to improve communication among team members
• What to do when projects are behind schedule

A customer concerned that their application was not performing drove us to explore new ways of analyzing system performance and conveying the results to our customers

Speech analytics is moving from a tool for governmental intelligence work to a commercially viable proposition in customer service. Join this session to learn of speech analytics and the implications of the technology.