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SpeechTEK 2014 - Monday, August 18, 2014
SUNRISE
SD101 – Pitfalls in measuring speech recognition accuracy
(Astor Ballroom (7th floor))
8:00 a.m - 8:45 a.m
David L Thomson, VP Speech Technology - CaptionCall

A topic of great interest and controversy in the speech industry is competitive benchmarking, studies designed to determine which of two or more recognizers is most accurate. Unfortunately, it is easy to produce skewed results, either by mistake or deliberately, so that the result are misleading. We will discuss common errors in experimental design or analysis and ways to ensure that tests accurately correspond user experience. "

SD102 – Improve ROI and Customer Experience With Cross-Channel Analytics a
(Empire Complex (7th floor))
8:00 a.m - 8:45 a.m
Sunil Issar, Director - VOZIQ

Analytics tools for IVRs and contact centers have improved significantly during the past decade. However, when we use these tools separately for self-service systems and contact centers, we miss the opportunity to optimize overall caller experience and improve automation rates. This session discusses various methodologies and tools for cross-channel analytics that can help identify caller intent. Attend this discussion to learn how analytics can improve ROI as well as customer satisfaction metrics and the overall customer experience.

SD103 – Use Speech and Language Technologies to Overcome Language Disorders
(Soho/Herald (7th floor))
8:00 a.m - 8:45 a.m
Deborah Dahl, Principal - Conversational Technologies

Speech and language disorders affect millions of adults and children and can greatly affect an individual’s quality of life. Speech and language technologies have a huge potential for addressing speech and language disorders, both for rehabilitation as well as for assistive technology. Software incorporating linguistic technologies can provide objective, consistent, and tireless feedback to language-impaired users. We discuss existing software, the principles of using speech and language software for language deficits, how different types of feedback apply to specific disorders, and what new applications might be possible.

SD104 – When a Freeware Speech Platform Isn’t Entirely Free
(Gramercy/Olmstead (7th floor))
8:00 a.m - 8:45 a.m
Jeffrey (Jeff) D Hopper, Vice President, Client Services - LumenVox, LLC

What are the pros and cons of using freeware platforms such as Asterisk to deploy speech applications? What challenges and hidden expenses are associated with deploying and maintaining a speech-enabled IVR solution? Other issues include using a freeware toolset to develop, test, deploy, and monitor an application; scalability issues; poor documentation; and the availability of competent resources to create a world-class solution. Learn the total cost of using a freeware speech platform compared to commercial platforms.

WELCOME & OPENING KEYNOTE
Broadway Ballroom (6th floor)
The Real Truth About Success
(Broadway Ballroom (6th floor))
9:00 a.m - 10:00 a.m
Garrison W Wynn, Author, The Real Truth About Success: What the Top 1% Do Differently, Why They Won’t Tell You, and How You Can Do It Anyway!

Prepare to laugh and learn as a decade of Wynn Solutions research reveals what makes owners and managers of top-performing businesses so effective—and it’s not what you’d expect! If you enter this keynote session expecting to learn all about best practices and superior strategy, you’d better read the title again. Standout success in a challenging economy often comes from personal advantage, whether it’s perceived value, personality, leadership style, communication skills, abundant resources, or access to privileged information. This entertaining session takes a realistic look at the influence you’ll need to make sure your knowledge and hard work deliver the results you want.

TRACK A: BUSINESS STRATEGIES
Astor Ballroom (7th floor)
A101 – Natural Language on Steroids—Bringing Omnichannel and Prediction to the User Interface
10:15 a.m - 11:00 a.m
Kathy Brown, Director of Speech Sciences & Analytics - [24]7

Join us for a discussion of the benefits of creating powerful, next-generation user interfaces that combine natural language processing, omnichannel prediction, Big Data, and real-time machine learning. Learn about a predictive natural language (PNL) solution that leverages a powerful statistical model to integrate interaction data across multiple modalities to accurately predict and understand user behavior and intent. By contextualizing generic language models, PNL solutions outperform traditional natural language interfaces and improve task completion and self-service rates.

A102 – PANEL: The Role of Human-Assisted Speech Recognition
11:15 a.m - 12:00 p.m
MODERATOR: Daniel Hong, Research Director & VP - Forrester Research
Matthew Panaccione, Solutions Consultant - West
Phil Gray, EVP of Business Development and Strategy - Interactions
Tim Moynihan, Senior Analyst and Project Leader - Opus Research

Human-assisted understanding is a new hybrid approach to speech recognition in which humans take over some recognition tasks from the system. Systems that rely on human-assisted understanding hide recognition errors from the user, resulting in speech interactions that appear to be more natural and robust, but are there drawbacks to this approach? This session explores the benefits and limitations of human-assisted understanding in creating a positive and productive customer experience.

Attendee Lunch
12:00 p.m - 1:15 p.m
A103 – Phonetic vs. Word-Based Speech Analytics: An Objective Assessment
1:15 p.m - 2:00 p.m
Marsal Gavalda, Director of Research - Expect Labs

The core technology underlying all current speech analytics products is either phonetic-based or word-based. This presentation offers a rigorous yet accessible explanation of how these two approaches work and provides an objective assessment of their benefits and shortcomings, as well as a detailed comparison of both technologies along the key dimensions of accuracy, speed, and storage requirements. This session arms you with the knowledge to make more informed decisions when faced with these two competing technologies.

A104 – PANEL: Evolution or Revolution?
2:15 p.m - 3:00 p.m
MODERATOR: Susan L. Hura, Principal - SpeechUsability
William Meisel, President - TMA Associates
Tim Moynihan, Senior Analyst and Project Leader - Opus Research
Art Schoeller, Vice President and Principal Analyst - Forrester Research

We are in the midst of rapid change in the speech industry, but is this a true paradigm shift or an adjustment to the status quo?Join us as panelists explore how changes to companies in the speech market, as well as new opportunities in wearables, home automation and entertainment, automotive, and mobile will affect future opportunities in speech technologies.

A105 – Using Customer Feedback to Improve Speech Applications
3:15 p.m - 4:00 p.m
Peter Leppik, President and CEO - Vocal Laboratories Inc.

Many organizations collect customer feedback about their speech applications and other elements of the customer experience, but often lack guidance on making the best use of this data. In this session, you hear three success stories in which the appropriate use of customer feedback led to better designs and better decisions about the speech application. These lessons will help your organization optimize the value of customer feedback to yield better customer experiences.

A106 – Solution Sessions
4:15 p.m - 5:00 p.m
Duke Energy: Automated Customer Experience Testing Assists Rapid Merger Integration
Linda Broome, Call Center Technology Manager - Duke IVR systems
Alok Kulkarni, CEO - Cyara

In 2012, Duke and Progressive Energy merged to create the new Duke Energy, the largest regulated utility in the U.S., with approximately 7 million customers across six states. The case for the merger included $650 million in guaranteed cost savings and a very aggressive customer service integration plan. Duke was able to integrate the customer service technologies and operations spanning several data centers, 6 states and 8 contact centers in just 12 months. All areas of the project had to seek innovation to meet the required timeframes of this aggressive project.

TRACK B: VOICE INTERACTION DESIGN
Empire Complex (7th floor)
B101 – PANEL: Challenges in User Authentication
10:15 a.m - 11:00 a.m
MODERATOR: Greg Bielby - VoltDelta
Rowland Hautsch, Sr Consultant/Speech Engineer - Avaya Inc
Caroline Nelson, User Interface Designer - Nuance Communications
Crispin Reedy, Director, User Experience - Versay Solutions
Mark Smolensky, Principal Member of Technical Staff, Product Realization & Architecture - AT&T AVIxD - Vice President

User authentication is a necessary first step for a vast variety of tasks. In spite of the ubiquity of authentication, it remains a challenge for automated systems to verify who is on the line before allowing a user to access personal data or perform transactions. Panelists in this session share their experiences with difficult authentication situations as well as tips and techniques for overcoming them.

B102 – First Steps in Using Analytic Data
11:15 a.m - 12:00 p.m
Leslie Carroll Walker, Senior Manager, UI Design, Global Professional Services, Customer Interaction Technology - Convergys

Analytics has received a great deal of attention in recent years, with just cause. Analytics provide new tools and methods for manipulating large amounts of data from multiple sources, which may result in dramatic cost savings, solid metrics, and eye-opening results. Get prepared! In this presentation, learn the basics of dealing with analytic data, methods for avoiding common stumbling blocks, and hear lessons learned from real deployments to help you ease into your first analytics effort.

Attendee Lunch
12:00 p.m - 1:15 p.m
B103 – It’s My Turn to Talk!
1:15 p.m - 2:00 p.m
Nandini Stocker, Sr. Product Design Manager - FlipKart

Each call to a speech IVR is a conversation that, like human conversations, can easily be disrupted when one party misreads the inherent turn-taking cues and talks out of line. While humans easily recover after interrupting each other, a single turn-taking error can derail a conversation with a speech application. This session explores the concept of turn-taking and offers actionable advice on how to prevent, diagnose, and repair designs plagued by turn-taking issues.

B104 – How to Design Without Giving Developers Headaches
2:15 p.m - 3:00 p.m
Kristie Goss-Flenord, Consultant, Human Factors - Convergys

The handoff of speech projects from the design team to developers is often less than successful because of poor communication and documentation. This session remedies this situation by providing a set of “spec-writing” guidelines to make developers’ jobs significantly easier by allowing them to focus on coding the application instead of deciphering the design specification. Such improved communications help to avoid project setbacks, reduce rework, and save time and money.

B105 – PANEL: Personalization, Privacy, and the Creepy Factor
3:15 p.m - 4:00 p.m
MODERATOR: Jenni McKienzie, Voice Interaction Designer - SpeechUsability
Randell Neuman, Staff UX Designer - Genesys
Rebecca Nowlin-Green, Principal Business Consultant - Nuance Communications, Inc.
Peter B Krogh, Robot Experience Designer - Jibo AVIxD, AVIOS

Personalization allows us to offer customers a more relevant interaction by utilizing the vast amount of information organizations have about them. Designers often limit the use of personal data for fear of triggering users’ concerns about Big Brother, but are we unnecessarily restricting design creativity? Attend this panel for an exploration of the circumstances when customers are creeped out by technology and what it knows about them and finding the line between creepy and cool.

B106 – Solution Sessions
4:15 p.m - 5:00 p.m
What we need to hear: Voice of the Customer
Levent Arslan, CEO - SESTEK Bogazici University
Yakup Dogan, Assistant General Manager, in charge of Alternative Delivery Channels - Yapi Kredi

Voice of the Customer is your key to grasp the spirit of your customer interactions. Through the collection, evaluation, and analysis of multichannel interaction data you will effectively assess customer satisfaction, elaborately measure key performance indicators, optimize your quality management and gain invaluable insights to act upon for operational excellence.

TRACK C: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES
Soho/Herald (7th floor)
C101 – Natural Interfaces in the Car: Leveraging Speech and Gesture
10:15 a.m - 11:00 a.m
Tom Schalk, Vice President of Voice Technology - Sirius XM

The solution to reducing driver distraction likely resides in combining a variety of driver interfaces to fit specific tasks. Speech plays a critical role for text entry while driving, but holistically, complex infotainment systems require simple, multimodal user interfaces. This presentation describes a multimodal HMI design model, along with supporting research, for driver actions such as task selection, list management, text entry, making requests, and map control, which are required to perform a growing assortment of in-vehicle, nondriving tasks.

C102 – PANEL: The Importance of Voice in the Multichannel Experience
11:15 a.m - 12:00 p.m
MODERATOR: Jenni McKienzie, Voice Interaction Designer - SpeechUsability
Helen Casewell, User Experience Research Manager - VoxGen
Renae Rogers, User Experience Designer - West Notifications Group AVIxD Board - Secretary
Tom Schalk, Vice President of Voice Technology - Sirius XM

Multichannel user experience has been a hot topic for a number of years, but integrating voice user interfaces in multichannel and cross-channel customer journeys remains a persistent challenge. Join panelists in this session as they analyze where voice brings the most value in multichannel interactions, discuss best practices for creating optimal voice user experiences, and share their experiences to help you design great multi- and cross-channel user experiences.

Attendee Lunch
12:00 p.m - 1:15 p.m
C103 – PANEL: The Digital Healthcare Revolution
1:15 p.m - 2:00 p.m
MODERATOR: Bruce Pollock, Vice President, Strategic Growth and Planning - West Interactive
Daniel Padgett, Software Engineer - Google
Nick van Terheyden, Chief Medical Information Officer - Nuance
David Claiborn, Senior Director, Product Design - United Health Group

This panel explores the opportunities and challenges associated with the digital healthcare revolution and the role of speech technologies in this changing world. What are the biggest obstacles to digital healthcare becoming a reality? Where do speech technologies bring the most value to healthcare? How will health providers, insurers, and payers provide patient support in the world of digital healthcare? Join us for analysis of the state of digital healthcare today and predictions for its future.

C104 – Building a Healthcare SMS Service From the Ground Up
2:15 p.m - 3:00 p.m
David Claiborn, Senior Director, Product Design - United Health Group

This session tells the story of a major healthcare organization as it decided to build its initial SMS service. Hear about its immersion into the unexpectedly complicated world of SMS messaging from short codes to the ultimate question of providing a service versus a solution for customers. This presentation gives common-sense advice on how to approach SMS as an integrated service channel that builds both positive customer experience and solid business value.

C105 – Lightning Session: Speech Transforms Healthcare
3:15 p.m - 4:00 p.m
MODERATOR: Susan L. Hura, Principal - SpeechUsability
Tobias Goebel, Senior Director Emerging Technologies, Product Management and Marketing - Aspect Software, Inc.
Theresa Szczurek, CEO and Co-Founder - Radish Systems, LLC
Tarah Knaresboro, VUI Design Manager, Product Design - Emmi Solutions

Speech technologies are playing an increasingly important role in healthcare delivery, monitoring, and communications. Attend this unique session to hear a series of 6 minute lightning talks on how speech is playing a part in transforming today's complex, inefficient healthcare into a better system for both patients and providers.

TRACK D: TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES
Gramercy/Olmstead (7th floor)
D101 – PANEL: New Technologies Coming Soon
10:15 a.m - 11:00 a.m
MODERATOR: Roberto Pieraccini, Director of Engineering - Google Switzerland Google
David Nahamoo, CTO - Pryon Recent IBM Fellow & Chief Scientist for Conversational Systems, IBM
Bernard Brafman, VP of Business Development - Sensory, Inc.
Brent Barbara, VP of Marketing at 3si - Surgical Safety Solutions
Dan Miller, Lead Analyst-Founder - Opus Research, Inc.

Experts describe recent advances and results that will soon be available for building products and services. Product planners and technology buyers can benefit from attending this session. Topics include speech recognition (new paradigms such as the template approach and deep neural networks), natural language understanding, dialogue systems (structural and machine learning approaches), and new applications (speech summarization, meeting recognition, media stream search, and others).

D102 – Omni-Channel Customer Care: Continuity for the customer's sake
11:15 a.m - 12:00 p.m
Tobias Goebel, Senior Director Emerging Technologies, Product Management and Marketing - Aspect Software, Inc.

Omni-channel is the new multi-channel: an interconnected experience where customers can pause and resume transactions as they please, jump seamlessly between channels as well as between self-service and agent-assisted service, while context and history is always preserved. The new mantra of the mobile customer experience: I shall never have to repeat myself again. This session will discuss the challenges of going omni-channel in customer care and what architecture needs to be in place to deliver on the vision. It will describe an architecture that allows for optimal reuse of resources and IP already created for IVR and integration between the different channels while leveraging each channel’s unique characteristics.

Attendee Lunch
12:00 p.m - 1:15 p.m
D103 – Build a Simple Virtual Assistant using AIML 2.0
1:15 p.m - 2:00 p.m
Richard Wallace, Chief Science Officer - Pandorabots, Inc.

Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) for Virtual Assistants 2.0 is a popular, standard technology used to create talking artificial intelligence characters (chatbots or virtual assistants). AIML 2.0 contains learning features so that the app can be taught personal information about each user. The language specification also includes a collection of functions to implement device control actions such as dialing, texting, sending and receiving emails, opening apps, checking device status, and more. Attendees use AIML 2.0 to build a simple virtual assistant and learn how to voice-enable it. See http://callmom.pandorabots.com/static/speechtek for details.

D104 – Add Voice to Your Virtual Assistant
2:15 p.m - 3:00 p.m
Michael McTear, Professor - Ulster University

In this continuation of D103, learn how to add speech recognition and speech synthesis to your personal assistant using the Android software development kit. Your virtual assistant will be able to chat about a range of everyday topics. You learn how to add the ability to execute search queries, control device functions, and make calls to web services. Take home your own speech-enabled virtual assistant. See http://www.spokenlanguagetechnology.com/speechtek/workshop.html for details.

D105 – Cut the Recognition Error Rate in Half
3:15 p.m - 4:00 p.m
Yves Normandin, CEO - Nu Echo Inc.

We have tuned the speech recognition accuracy of many IVR applications and significantly improved the performance by simply tuning speech grammars and confidence levels, with little or no changes to the application call flow. In most cases, we have been able to cut down the speech recognition error rate by around 50%. How do we do it? Come and learn the key tuning techniques that we have developed through the years which have enabled us to achieve such consistently good results.

D106 – Solution Sessions
4:15 p.m - 5:00 p.m

See two 20-minute presentations about some of the latest technological developments in speech technology from companies at the conference.

RECEPTION
Grand Opening Reception in the Customer Solutions Expo
5:00 p.m - 7:00 p.m

Join your peers on Monday after the sessions for the opening of the Customer Solutions Expo - featuring the CRM Evolution, SpeechTEK, and Customer Service Experience Showcases. Visit with conference sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and other attendees while enjoying light hors d'oeuvres and drinks.




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