What are they doing? What is on their minds? How did they come to important decisions about their speech technology projects? Do their systems work as promised? Where are the headaches and pitfalls? Listen to this high-powered customer panel and learn what customers of speech technology systems are thinking and how they are making their decisions. Find out what is important to them—and how they are coping with the challenges of procurement, deployment, and implementation of speech systems. If you are a customer or thinking about implementing a speech technology system, you’ll gain valuable insights and learn best practices. If you are a speech vendor, this keynote panel takes you behind the scenes into what customers are really thinking and doing—and wanting.

Continue conversations with these customers and learn more about their speech technology implementations in a breakout session following this keynote, from 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. in the Broadway Ballroom.

What are the critical success factors that need to be in place for speech to be truly mainstream? This 360-degree review presents the results of an ambitious set of surveys with end users of speech applications, business decision makers, technical decision makers, and call center managers. The results will be interpreted and debated by a panel of industry experts.

The way a speech application is presented can have a huge impact on its ultimate success. Applications that are deployed with a solid understanding of the views of the customers who will use them are more likely to succeed—but what is the best way to obtain this understanding? Once an application is ready to deploy, what’s the best way to roll it out to customers? Learn how positioning a speech application correctly can help achieve your goals.

The Ha Poalim Bank presents the methodologies and best practices it used to discover information to improve its system’s VUI, and discusses the different customer groups that participated. Hear about the importance and challenges of using focus groups in the VUI design process for the banking environment, and learn about the results and conclusions that were directly used to improve speech application in terms of lexicon, prompt design, and persona.

Considerable focus as been placed on the design and development of an application, but it is important to look at the whole project engagement. Like a great story, the beginning (pre-sales, requirements capture, etc.) should grab your attention and set the context for the rest of the project, and the end should leave you satisfied with the experience. Using customer case studies this presentation shares ideas for ensuring that your speech story is a best-seller.

Join the editors of Speech Technology magazine as they present the first annual Speech Industry Awards to leading technology vendors, customers who have shown impressive gains with their speech technology implementation, and influential individuals who are moving the industry forward.

What’s the next big thing in speech? What challenges lie ahead and how can we overcome them? Speakers in this session tell us what to look for in the coming months and years and help us understand where we are today. Learn about latest developments in VXML 3.0, and gain insight into the role of speech in a GUI-dominated world.

Anyone who has ever worked on a speech project has them—war stories of missteps we wish we could have avoided. This panel of experts represents a wealth of experience with real speech deployments and offers these experiences to help save you from their bloopers. Panelists will offer their best tips and tricks of the trade about how to avoid the “oops” factor and to keep your speech projects on track.

What are they doing? What is on their minds? How did they come to important decisions about their speech technology projects? Do their systems work as promised? Where are the headaches and pitfalls? Listen to this high-powered customer panel and learn what customers of speech technology systems are thinking and how they are making their decisions. Find out what is important to them—and how they are coping with the challenges of procurement, deployment, and implementation of speech systems. If you are a customer or thinking about implementing a speech technology system, you’ll gain valuable insights and learn best practices. If you are a speech vendor, this keynote panel takes you behind the scenes into what customers are really thinking and doing—and wanting.

Continue conversations with these customers and learn more about their speech technology implementations in a breakout session following this keynote, from 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. in the Broadway Ballroom.

The automobile was just another form of wheeled transportation, but over time it enabled the movement of people and goods in ways even its inventors could barely imagine. We have reached a similar evolutionary point for voice interaction design practices. Just as early drivers and road rules held on to outdated ways, many of today’s designs cling to habits established when we knew far less about their impact. We need to acknowledge that designing spoken language should be more rigorous than we thought and make room for serious advances. Let’s explore what this means and where voice interaction design must go as this vital, still-new technology interface progresses.

The focus in VUI design is often to discover and apply universal principles to guide all our designs. As voice user interfaces are used in more varied contexts and with different user populations, we increasingly discover that there are exceptions to the rules. Best practices that clearly work in some domains may not be effective in others. Learn how to break the rules of design properly and when to do so to create the most effective VUI designs.

Applications with high repeat caller rates require specific design approaches in order to reduce repetitive information and improve customer satisfaction levels. Hear about the repeat caller rates from banking, insurance, and airline verticals, and see examples from applications that were tuned to improve customer satisfaction and reduce call durations for applications with high repeat callers. Attendees will learn about the implications of repeat caller rate on design decisions and hear practical techniques to improve customer satisfaction and success rates of applications with high repeat caller rates.

This presentation explores alternative design strategies to VUI design “best practices” and shows case studies in which alternative design strategies were used. It doesn’t argue against VUI design best practices, but emphasizes that alternative solutions have worked when the situation calls for it, encouraging attendees to challenge themselves and their vendors to consciously make design decisions based on specific situations.

Join the editors of Speech Technology magazine as they present the first annual Speech Industry Awards to leading technology vendors, customers who have shown impressive gains with their speech technology implementation, and influential individuals who are moving the industry forward.

Can we create VUI standards? Should we? What would VUI standards look like, and what would be their impact? Should we have global commands (such as “help” or “back up”) that are part of a global grammar for all applications? These topics and more will be the subject of this thought-provoking session.

How helpful is “help”? Do speech applications need universal commands? A VUI isn’t a GUI, and this presentation will focus on the hotly debated topic of whether or not VUI standards are achievable. We’ll discuss why the “holy grail of standards” in the speech industry is a myth. Instead of debating how to standardize, we need to be debating, “Do we standardize?” As a community of VUI experts, let’s agree on VUI best practices to achieve the goal of effective and appealing interfaces.

This presentation reviews some discussions in the VUIDs group about VUI standards, including global grammars, help, and naming your persona.

Back for an encore from SpeechTEK 2006 is Greg Simsar’s provocative, interactive, and fun debate on hot topics in VUI design. Noted industry experts will offer their often opposing viewpoints on the state of VUI 2007, and the audience is highly encouraged to enter the fray. Come for lively discussion, friendly feuding, and strong opinions, and leave with many new perspectives on VUI design.

What are they doing? What is on their minds? How did they come to important decisions about their speech technology projects? Do their systems work as promised? Where are the headaches and pitfalls? Listen to this high-powered customer panel and learn what customers of speech technology systems are thinking and how they are making their decisions. Find out what is important to them—and how they are coping with the challenges of procurement, deployment, and implementation of speech systems. If you are a customer or thinking about implementing a speech technology system, you’ll gain valuable insights and learn best practices. If you are a speech vendor, this keynote panel takes you behind the scenes into what customers are really thinking and doing—and wanting.

Continue conversations with these customers and learn more about their speech technology implementations in a breakout session following this keynote, from 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. in the Broadway Ballroom.

Natural language (NL) is used (and misused) to mean many different capabilities, ranging from continuous speech recognition to complete understanding of conversational English. Aaron Fisher will overview various types of NL and discuss how it works. Marco Petroni describes best practices for implementing a popular type of natural language call steering, which automatically routes callers to one of several destinations.

In this presentation hear how natural language speech recognition can improve service and defray costs for call routing and transaction processing. Learn the key, unique steps involved in planning, designing, and implementing a natural language solution and hear high-level case studies on successful applications.

Using real-world experience, this presentation shows the pros and cons of different tagging approaches and presents best practices around tag definition and design. The benefits and trade-offs of “coarser” application level tags and of “more granular” semantic level tags will be discussed, as well as what each approach offers in terms of application functionality and flexibility for the future.

Speaker authentication is a form of biometric-based security that uses features of a person’s voice to validate that they are who they claim to be. It secures sensitive transactions made over the telephone and ensures that only authorized individuals have access to sensitive information and mission-critical resources. This session addresses the major authentication issues of premise-based or managed service, registration procedures, challenge dialogs, and accuracy.

AHM is leading the way in protecting its customers’ privacy with a high-tech but simple biometric voice verification system. An Australian “first,” the system protects customers from identity theft and fraudulent activities as well as improves its customer experience by eliminating intrusive identity-check questions.

Aeroplan, Canada’s leading loyalty marketing program, has implemented an innovative voice recognition service on its speech platform. Members who enroll their voice prints have full “anywhere access” to their accounts in an extremely privacy-secure environment, while eliminating the need to retain yet another password or PIN.

Join the editors of Speech Technology magazine as they present the first annual Speech Industry Awards to leading technology vendors, customers who have shown impressive gains with their speech technology implementation, and influential individuals who are moving the industry forward.

New and exciting types of user interfaces are required to take full advantage of multiple modes of input, such as speech and keypads/mouse pads. Two case studies in this session describe how multimodal applications were developed, one for those learning how to speak English, and one for individuals with aphasia, a loss of language ability resulting from brain injury, who needed speech therapy. The speakers describe how they used multimodal user interfaces to enable these applications, the problems encountered, and best practices for developing multimodal applications.

Hear a case study of a multimodal application that integrates speech and GUI to provide speech therapy for individuals with aphasia, a loss of language ability resulting from brain injury. Debbie Dahl describes the requirements analysis, prototyping, and user testing phases of the project as well as user feedback.

Language learning presents some unique challenges with the lack of trained instructors, few opportunities to practice speaking, and inadequate tools to manage student progress. Learn how one company is addressing these challenges in China with a technology-based, spoken-English training service delivered over the Internet to students in schools and homes in China.

Video adds a new dimension to speech applications, enabling users not only to “speak and listen,” but to “see” as well. VoiceXML applications may be easily augmented to become interactive video applications while retaining standard speech services such as speech recognition and speech synthesis. Experts describe existing implementations and video features in future standards such as VoiceXML 3.0.

This presentation examines how standard VoiceXML applications can be easily augmented to become interactive video applications while retaining standard speech services such as ASR and TTS. Existing implementations and future standards will be covered, including multimedia functionality in VoiceXML 3.0.

This presentation discusses opportunities for the deployment of speech-enabled video applications in the enhanced services and managed service environments, as well as how speech and video applications can be used in the contact center. Topics include architecture, applications, and the relationship to standards, including SIP and VoiceXML.

What are they doing? What is on their minds? How did they come to important decisions about their speech technology projects? Do their systems work as promised? Where are the headaches and pitfalls? Listen to this high-powered customer panel and learn what customers of speech technology systems are thinking and how they are making their decisions. Find out what is important to them—and how they are coping with the challenges of procurement, deployment, and implementation of speech systems. If you are a customer or thinking about implementing a speech technology system, you’ll gain valuable insights and learn best practices. If you are a speech vendor, this keynote panel takes you behind the scenes into what customers are really thinking and doing—and wanting.

Continue conversations with these customers and learn more about their speech technology implementations in a breakout session following this keynote, from 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. in the Broadway Ballroom.

Identity theft and organized criminal activity to commit fraud have become prevalent on the Web. Learn how to avoid fraudulent mechanisms that are used to infiltrate the phone channel, including “product delivery confirmers,” change of billing attempts, phone number spoofing, and “voice phishing.” Learn how to mitigate risks associated with attacks that may compromise your user-sensitive data.

Fraudsters are picky professionals. They band together forming a supply chain for stolen identities. This presentation disrobes the fraudsters, describes how they conduct business, and with what tools, and especially focuses on how they exploit the phone channel to make money off innocent consumers.

The telephone channel is not immune to such malicious attacks as identity theft. Learn how vulnerabilities in today’s technology can lead to fraud, and find out how to mitigate risks associated with attacks and fulfill the potential of your speaker verification systems.

Speech technology deployments raise new political and legal issues. Should the FTC be able to place severe restrictions on outbound IVR calls? Should the government mandate how personal data should be made secure? Who owns your “voice print”? How should the speech industry react to government efforts to exercise controls? Hear this panel discuss these and other legal issues surrounding speech applications and technology.

Join the editors of Speech Technology magazine as they present the first annual Speech Industry Awards to leading technology vendors, customers who have shown impressive gains with their speech technology implementation, and influential individuals who are moving the industry forward.

Paul English presented the getHuman.com guidelines for improving IVR systems in a keynote address at last year’s SpeechTEK conference. The guidelines attempt to eliminate IVR features that most anger customers, but sometimes run counter to business goals and cost issues. How should the speech industry react to these guidelines? Will consumers revolt against IVRs that fail to implement the guidelines? Members of this lively panel represent all viewpoints in this controversial discussion.

For a successful speech application, do not follow these practices! Learn about the pitfalls and stumbling blocks of speech application deployments and how to avoid them from two of the industry’s leading experts.

While there have been many successful and ROI-generating deployments of speech recognition technology, other efforts have fallen flat. Indeed, some critics compare speech recognition to Flash animation for a Web site; it helps embellish some interactions but can be downright annoying in others. Explore where speech makes sense and, more importantly, where it doesn’t.

Tired of guidelines that only tell you what to do? This presentation takes the opposite approach and tells you what not to do. Hear when not to use speech recognition, when not to use speech synthesis, and what not to do when deploying a self-service solution into your integrated contract center.

What are they doing? What is on their minds? How did they come to important decisions about their speech technology projects? Do their systems work as promised? Where are the headaches and pitfalls? Listen to this high-powered customer panel and learn what customers of speech technology systems are thinking and how they are making their decisions. Find out what is important to them—and how they are coping with the challenges of procurement, deployment, and implementation of speech systems. If you are a customer or thinking about implementing a speech technology system, you’ll gain valuable insights and learn best practices. If you are a speech vendor, this keynote panel takes you behind the scenes into what customers are really thinking and doing—and wanting.

Continue conversations with these customers and learn more about their speech technology implementations in a breakout session following this keynote, from 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. in the Broadway Ballroom.

Methods for tuning speech applications have grown and evolved with the industry. Learn how to manage a successful tuning project to get maximum value from your speech application. Topics include setting tuning objectives, understanding caller behavior and intent, measuring dissatisfiers and inefficiencies, and identifying the highest-impact tuning opportunities. Learn how to capture whole calls and how to use them to improve caller success rates by another 30-40% after traditional speech tuning.

Learn how to improve speech recognition using computationally lightweight post-ASR information, and hear how an n-best list and other information from the ASR can be used to improve speech recognition accuracy. Experts will present several examples and techniques for developing dialogs that can improve the perceived recognition accuracy. These techniques can improve out-of-vocabulary rejection and improve the correct recognition of user utterances.

The basic automatic speech recognition (ASR) result string is sufficient for most tasks. But in longer sessions or in more challenging environments an application can benefit greatly with even small amounts of error reduction. This presentation describes some computationally lightweight post-ASR methods that use standard, readily available ASR result information to enhance performance. These techniques can improve out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rejection, improve the correct recognition of marginal results when there are expectations, and salvage parts of utterances.

Speech recognition technology has come a long way but it’s still not perfect. Sometimes a misrecognition can be salvaged by looking at all the information returned by the recognizer. This presentation explores the information from speech recognizers and shows several examples and techniques for developing dialogs that can improve perceived recognition accuracy.

Join the editors of Speech Technology magazine as they present the first annual Speech Industry Awards to leading technology vendors, customers who have shown impressive gains with their speech technology implementation, and influential individuals who are moving the industry forward.

Learn how two companies use caller feedback from multiple sources to revise and improve their respective IVR systems. Learn how to collect and analyze the information and to determine how to modify the speech application. Most important, find out how feedback improves performance.

Hear how National Government Services (formerly Empire Medicare Services) used caller feedback to drive innovation in its contact centers. Find out what methods were used to collect the feedback and engage the callers, what internal processes occurred to improve the applications, and the positive results experienced as a consequence of this unique post-implementation procedure.

After Travelocity deployed its revamped IVR in the summer of 2006, it began getting a lot of reports about it. Each one told something different, but that’s a lot of data to look at. Every bit is valuable, but what do we need at our fingertips? Interested parties from the different areas got together and identified the key indicators for the health of the system and developed a dashboard of those most important factors. This presentation looks at what Travelocity had to choose from, what was selected and why, and how it has helped.

In this lighthearted final session, Michael Picheny discusses a Shakespearian view of the status and future of speech recognition, leading us through Shakespeare’s writings with lessons for speech technology use. To paraphrase As You Like It, “All of SpeechTEK is a stage, And all the speech professionals merely players.” Professor Feinberg looks at the lighter side of call centers and customer satisfaction from a different perspective. Clips from movies and commercials illustrate that customer satisfaction is the only reason for speech technology and call centers. Caution: This is not the usual traditional professorial dry lecture.