Call For Participation

You are now invited to submit proposals for SpeechTEK 2009, which will be held August 24-26, 2009, at the New York Marriott Marquis. SpeechTEK is a forum where consumers of speech can interact with speech vendors and industry experts. Our emphasis is on Speech in the Enterprise. Sessions should provide valuable and timely lessons on speech technology strategy, design, evaluation, implementation, and maintenance for enterprises. We welcome pitches that will offer guidance in speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speaker authentication, mobile search, dialog management, and related technologies. Proposals can come from speech technology users, researchers, designers, developers, and providers.

Presentations
We invite proposals in the following categories for regular 20-minute conference presentations. Sessions that explore new speech deployments, new research and data, and new techniques for using speech in a difficult economic climate are preferred.

Customer Case Studies: Top Priority
Conference attendees learn best from the experiences of others like them! Our top priority for SpeechTEK 2009 is to encourage and facilitate case studies presented by organizations using speech technology. The goal of a case study presentation is for customers to present lessons learned from actual speech deployments. Whether you have a success story or a cautionary tale to tell, case studies are all about what worked, what didn’t, and why. Successful proposals will explore the following themes: Why did you choose speech? What business problems were you trying to solve? What methods did you use to design, implement, test, deploy, and monitor your application? Which methods were successful and which would you change? What advice would you give to an organization considering speech? Vendors, encourage your customers to present case studies.

Click here to submit a Customer Case Study proposal.

Business Strategies
Speech technologies offer organizations new and cost-effective methods to engage with their customers, but the benefits of speech can go unrealized if it is not used strategically to address business goals. Presentations in this track should focus on ideas such as: how speech technologies can help companies in a difficult economic climate, which business problems speech technologies can solve, why customers willingly use some speech applications over others, when and how to adopt speech technologies, how to establish organizational and customer-centric goals for speech technology, techniques for evaluating the success of a speech deployment, strategies for improving customer experiences, methods of effectively planning for and managing speech projects, new mobile speech technologies, and recent government regulations that will affect speech technology projects. Successful proposals will include data from actual customer deployments and examples of strategies in use.

Click here to submit a Business Strategies proposal.

Speech Practitioner Best Practices
Calling all speech practitioners! This category is devoted to the tools, languages, and software that are at the heart of speech technology. The best proposals will present novel techniques, tools, and methodologies and demonstrate their value to speech development and deployment. Which deployment strategies succeed and fail?  Guidelines for successful business requirements collection, debugging, system testing, and tuning. We will favor proposals that include demonstrations, prototypes, examples, and actual experiences.

Click here to submit a Speech Practitioner Best Practices proposal.

Principles of Voice User Interface Design—by and for VUI Designers
User-centered voice interaction design is key to the success of the implementation of speech technology. This track targets advanced techniques for optimizing the user-facing elements of speech and multimodal technologies and the impact of the user interface on customer experience. We invite proposals that offer the VUI design community new perspectives on strategies, methods, or tools to optimize the design or evaluation of voice user interfaces. All proposals should back up ideas with data in the form of example customer interactions, trends across multiple applications, or results of usability testing, tuning, or pilot testing. We will favor proposals that focus on novel and advanced themes over established or introductory material.

Click here to submit a Principles of Voice User Interface Design proposal.

Advanced Speech Technologies—by and for speech technologists
Where is speech going? What's the next big thing? Proposals in this area present new technology that will change the way we use speech. Successful proposals will present a new development, explain the rationale for its creation, demonstrate why it is different from the rest, and discuss possible issues that the new technology may create. We are looking for new technology from universities and research labs that will be available in 1-3 years. We solicit proposals in:

• Natural language processing, including natural language understanding, machine translation, response generation
• Advanced recognition techniques, including emotion detection, subject categorization, speaker identification and verification, and advances in automatic speech recognition
• Advanced dialog techniques, including rule-based dialogs, data driven dialogs, and integration of multiple dialog strategies
• Voice search technologies, including query formulation, metadata for voice search, voice search algorithms, search result presentation
• Intelligent agents, including context management, history management, integration with databases, and knowledge bases
• Multimodal dialogs, including video in VoiceXML and multichannel synchronization
• Supporting technologies, including headsets, microphones, embedded speech technologies, and telecommunications equipment that supports successful deployment of speech technologies
  

Click here to submit an Advanced Speech Technology proposal.

SpeechTEK University—by and for practitioners
If you have a special skill or body of knowledge, we invite you to share it with the SpeechTEK audience. We invite proposals for half-day tutorials on any aspect of speech technology and how it can be used to solve business problems. Tutorials may be introductory or advanced, but should focus on delivering useful knowledge and skills to the audience.  Participatory and hands-on tutorials are encouraged. Proposals should include the tutorial goal, intended audience, and an outline of the information to be covered during the tutorial.

Click here to submit a SpeechTEK University proposal.

Sunrise Discussions—for customers and practitioners
These 1-hour early morning sessions enable attendees to share their speech technology challenges and best practices with other participants. We are seeking discussion leaders (consultants, analysts, or customers) to suggest session topics, act as facilitators for these interactive sessions, and offer guidance when needed.

Click here to submit a Sunrise Discussion proposal.

SpeechTEK Labs
SpeechTEK Labs is back for a second year to offer speech vendors the opportunity to show how their best products stack up against the competition in three areas. These four-hour labs enable conference attendees to experience the technologies firsthand. Judges will rate each entry and the evaluations will be included in an upcoming issue of Speech Technology magazine. We will hold labs in the following three areas:

• Speaker Identification and Verification
• Speech Synthesis
• Mobile Devices
  

Click here to submit a SpeechTEK Labs proposal.

Demonstrations
SpeechTEK 2009 offers two new opportunities for vendors to present their newest tools and products.  These non-competitive sessions are designed to showcase prototype and soon-to-be-released technologies.

• Tools Beta Demos (new this year)
  Vendors with prototype voice user interface design and development tools are invited to present their tools to conference attendees. Each vendor will give an individual demonstration to allow them to highlight new and unique qualities and features of their tool. Proposals should include the goal of the beta tool, the tool’s name (or code name), and expected availability.
• Voice-Enabled Enterprise in Action (new this year)
  This session features demonstrations of the many ways speech technologies can be used to benefit the enterprise. Demonstrations could include dictation, warehouse management, dynamic delivery routing, dynamic repair scheduling, voice and video conferencing, voice technology in emergency response situations and other applications illustrating how speech technology can solve business problems. These demonstrations will be held on the show floor and will allow conference attendees to see speech technologies in use.

Click here to submit a Demonstration proposal.

Submitting a Proposal
Proposals for 20-minute, general session presentations should include a 250-word abstract and at least 3 key ideas you intend to convey in your presentation. Proposals may be submitted online at www.speechtek.com/2009/proposals. The deadline for submissions is January 19, 2009.

Important Dates
January 19, 2009: Proposals due
February 16, 2009: Acceptance and rejection notifications sent to presenters
June 15, 2009:  Final presentations, permission paperwork, and biographies due
August 24-26, 2009: SpeechTEK 2008 conference
August 23 and 27, 2009: SpeechTEK University


For more information or questions, please contact SpeechTEKchairs@infotoday.com