How do you get your team to want to create, invent, and innovate? In this session, we discuss proven strategies for promoting a culture of innovation at your organization. You learn which techniques work and which ones to avoid. We cover unique ways to encourage your employees to contribute to the creation process. You also learn about patents, copyrights, and trademarks and how to protect your company’s intellectual property in a rapidly changing technology environment.

The patent field remains turbulent, especially with respect to patents that cover so-called “abstract ideas.” Other evolving issues include formalities, obviousness, postgrant administrative proceedings, and litigation. We begin with a primer on basic principles, new law, and strategies and conclude with a discussion of these evolving issues.

When evaluating speech solutions, decision makers often ask, “What are the accuracy numbers?” By itself, “accuracy” is an overloaded term in the speech industry and often means different things to different people. This presentation defines a number of metrics to indicate the performance of a speech application and educates decision makers on how to make good solution decisions.

Deployment of “say anything” or natural language technologies for call centers is now mainstream, but the standard methodologies for documenting the VUI design may not be appropriate. Find out how our peers document the VUI in a way that is complete and can be used as a functional design but is also understandable to non-IT stakeholders.

This session discusses the recent changes in patent law and speculates on how those changes will affect the user interfaces of the future. In particular, there are new opportunities for small companies to assert intellectual property in the current environment, while the risks associated with aggressive pursuit of new applications has been significantly reduced.

Conversational interfaces provide an opportunity to create experiences that are much easier to use than existing accessible technologies. We demonstrate a fully conversational shopping client, SayShopping, and discuss the opportunities for voice-based technologies in the accessibility industry. Seewww.youtube.com/watch?v=gOMj-1ssueIfor a preview.

What do clients really mean by “It just doesn’t work”? How, as voice interaction designers, can we interpret what our clients are trying to tell us when they really can’t even explain it themselves? This session explores the top questions a voice interaction designer should be asking to get to the root of what’s really bothering our clients as well as strategies to turn this negative perception into a positive reality.

One of the world’s top experts on web-related speech standards reviews the state of speech standards today, the value of standards in an industry and to specific businesses, ways to use standards development to your advantage, and some areas that could be ripe for standardization.

Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication, and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers. As VUI design becomes part of the large design world, we discuss what the emerging discipline of service design can teach us and which omnichannel applications might provide the most practical “bang for the buck.”

“My New Voice” is a chamber opera in progress. The piece tells the story of Trevor, a character with motor neuron disease, who uses a TTS synthesizer to speak. In this session, the presenters discuss their experience as users of speech technology, show clips from the performance, and generalize learned information to broader industry applicability. Their conclusions demonstrate that such niche applications can provide both practical and deep insights into the tools, capabilities, interfaces, and design constraints of speech technology.

This session discusses how to support and seamlessly augment social, email, direct mail, or live agent interactions with outbound IVR applications. We review several case studies describing how outbound IVR experience delighted customers because they were updated in real time with accurate contextual messaging that was customized on a one-on-one basis for each and every client, and was integrated and in sync with messaging from other channels.

As self-service interactions have shifted to other channels, a strong emphasis on cost containment in operational areas has left a legacy of features intended only to make life easier for a company, not the caller. With creative applications of emerging technologies that can identify and even authenticate callers behind the scenes, is it time to retire the habit of forcing callers through voice-based identification and verification procedures simply to make life easier for an agent?