Biographical Information
Dr. Deborah Dahl
Principal
Conversational Technologies
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Dr. Deborah Dahl is the Principal at Conversational Technologies, where she assists her clients in understanding the speech marketplace, developing speech product strategies and in designing innovative applications of speech technology. She also serves as Chair of the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group and is a member of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group. Dr. Dahl has written many technical papers in this area and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. She also writes a bimonthly column on standards for Speech Technology Magazine.
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SpeechTEK 2010
SpeechTEK 2009
Wednesday, August 26 2009
SpeechTEK 2008
SpeechTek 2007
Thursday, August 23: SpeechTEK University
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Articles By Dr. Deborah Dahl
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Now is the time to revisit and update some of the early voice standards.
Multimodal interfaces can make or break the user experience.
VoiceXML 3.0 should be out by the end of this year.
Why we need them, and where we can get them.
As standards advance, things just work together better.
SCXML lets users travel through many states without leaving the phone
SpeechTEK attendees conduct hands-on evaluations.
Markup language makes it easier to develop telephony applications.
Standards can help bring more applications to bear.
W3C drafts the standard in multimodal architectures.
New W3C standard promises to improve pronunciation.
The new standard for representing what the user said
Speech interfaces in which users respond in their own words to open-ended prompts like "How may I help you?" are becoming more and more widely deployed. They are most frequently used in routing applications where the application's task is to identify the topic of the users' requests and transfer them to another part of the system where their requests can be addressed.
There's been a lot of negative press recently about poorly designed touchtone and speech-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) systems. I'm sorry to say that most of the problems that I've heard, read about, or personally experienced are real. To make matters worse, the situation is inexcusable because the underlying technology that powers these applications is very flexible and can do significantly more than what it is being used for today. Poor implementations are giving these systems a bad reputation, as has long been the case.
A good voice user interface (VUI) is central to any successful speech application. Although VUI's are made up of many components, if the persona is very memorable, users' perceptions of it can dominate their opinions about the entire system, overwhelming all other aspects of the system in the users' minds. As such, a good or bad persona can have major consequences for the success of a system. …
A good voice user interface (VUI) is central to any successful speech application. Although VUI's are made up of many components, if the persona is very memorable, users' perceptions of it can dominate their opinions about the entire system, overwhelming all other aspects of the system in the users' minds. As such, a good or bad persona can have major consequences for the success of a system. …
The contact center speech recognition market is maturing, but it is far from slowing down. On the contrary, it’s experiencing an upswing in sales that it hasn’t seen for at least three or four years. This market is consolidating, making room for a variety of new entrants and is finally growing in port size. According to Steve Cramoysan of Gartner DataQuest, “preliminary analysis of the 2004 speech recognition market reveals an overall growth in port…
For years, speech analytics have been used worldwide by security organizations to help government agencies identify potential risks and threats. In the past two years, contact centers have begun to use speech analytics applications to capture and structure customer communications. The applications analyze the structured data to identify customer trends and insights for the purpose of improving service quality, customer satisfaction, and generating new revenue. …
Rarely does a technical standard directly benefit end users. However, in the world of speech technologies they do. Standards facilitate innovation and reduction in the total cost of ownership of speech applications, but have been slow to market. Standards allow programmers to create platform-independent (and ideally vendor-independent) speech applications.
The visually-oriented graphical user interface (GUI) is a powerful, familiar, and highly functional approach to interacting with computers. But, as speech technology becomes increasingly available, it’s natural to think about how speech could be used in GUI interfaces as well as voice-only interfaces.
The visually-oriented graphical user interface (GUI) is a powerful, familiar, and highly functional approach to interacting with computers. But, as speech technology becomes increasingly available, it's natural to think about how speech could be used in GUI interfaces as well as voice-only interfaces.
Many of speech recognition’s most important contributions to productivity have to do with mobility. For example, speech allows telephone users to simply say the name of the person they are calling and be connected, a big advantage for cellular phone users in the car.
Microsoft and Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products have announced a broad strategic alliance designed to accelerate development of the next generation of voice-enabled computing on the Microsoft Windows platform. <@SM>