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Customer Case Studies
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Customer case study presentations give you insight into how speech technologies are being applied in real-world situations. Presenters share how they successfully procure, implement, and deploy existing speech applications and how they avoid common pitfalls. Customer case studies will be presented on automatic speech recognition solutions, analytics, and speaker authentication across a wide variety of industries. Listen to presentations from companies in the following industries:
SpeechTEK 2015 - Monday, August 17, 2015
C103 – Mitigating Driver Distraction: Combining Speech With a Haptic Controller
1:15 p.m - 2:00 p.m
Tom Schalk, Vice President of Voice Technology - Sirius XM

With a greater quantity of infotainment flowing to the vehicle, the solution to reducing driver distraction likely resides in combining a variety of driver interfaces to fit specific tasks. This presentation describes a multimodal user interface that leverages speech and a haptic controller that is better-suited for tasks that require simple user interaction. We demonstrate an interface in which visual information is presented in the form of iconic tiles that enable content discovery and selection with minimal visual dependency.

C104 – Sirius: An Open End-to-End Voice and Vision Personal Assistant (Like Siri)
2:15 p.m - 3:00 p.m
Jason Mars, Assistant Professor, EECS Dept. - University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

As user demand scales for intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana, we are approaching the computational limits of current datacenter architectures. In this presentation, we present the design of Sirius, an open end-to-end IPA web-service application that accepts queries in the form of voice and images, and responds with natural language. We describe how we used Sirius to evaluate future accelerator-based server architectures.

SpeechTEK 2015 - Tuesday, August 18, 2015
B205 – Taking Speech to the Next Level
4:15 p.m - 5:15 p.m
Brian Enright, Manager of Business Integration - Orlando Utilities Commission

Learn how the Orlando Utilities Commission optimizes its voice integration system to better serve its utility customers. The session highlights the techniques, processes, and procedures used to continuously improve the speech system. In addition, it illustrates the importance of reporting analytics, high-level speech tuning, and quantifying results of incremental changes. Attend this session to learn how to optimize your voice interaction system by leveraging practical techniques and processes.

Challenges, Metrics, and Results of Upgrading to Natural Language Understanding
Valentyna Yarosh, Head of Customer Service - Alfa Bank

Alfa Bank upgraded from DTMF to natural language understanding to replace human agent talk time with automated service, increase first-call resolution, decrease queues, shorten average handling time, and become the preferred channel for many customers who went to physical retail stores. Learn how it overcame several problems, including multiple languages (Ukrainian, Russian, and the combination Ukrainian and Russian), long numbers such as credit card numbers, and customer uneasiness with open question (such as, “How may I help you?”).

C204 – PANEL: Is Customer Experience Truly Omnichannel?
2:45 p.m - 3:30 p.m
MODERATOR: Vicki Broman, Manager of User Interface and Research Teams, CTI and Speech Solutions - eLoyalty® a TeleTech Company Phoenix Fire Department Crisis Counselor;CHt
Allyson Boudousquie, VP Market & Product Strategy - Concentrix
Daniel Padgett, Software Engineer - Google
Michael Pell, Director of Design Services, Professional Services - Interactions Corporation AVIS, Boy Scouts of America
Deborah Rapsinski, Chief Customer Experience Officer - Think Tank Partners

Consumers expect information to be readily available no matter what channel they choose, and companies have provided access to this information via IVR, web, mobile apps, email, SMS, chat and in-person with live agents. The goal is a seamless experience for customers no matter which channel they select or how they move among channels. Panelists in this session critically examine how successful companies have been at providing a cohesive omnichannel experience, detail examples of broken experiences, and explore strategies for improvement.

C205 – Speech Enables Natural Language and Machine Translation
4:15 p.m - 5:15 p.m
Nabeel AlKhatib, Executive Editor - Al Arabiya News Channel
Mohammad Shihadah, Chairman and Co-Founder - AppTek

Despite the increasingly widespread use of speech technology, in everyday life, there continues to be great skepticism about this technology for use in broadcast media. Learn how ASR, machine learning, and machine translation techniques are used for closed captioning and subtitling, producing results that challenge manual approaches. The presentation uses case study data from AppTek’s work using speech technology with the Middle East Broadcast Corporation’s Al Arabiya News.

Lessons Learned from Deploying and Maintaining a Natural Speech IVR
Andrea Ayres, Senior Manager of Telephony Automated Services - Lloyds Banking Group
David Attwater, Senior Scientist - Enterprise Integration Group

Lloyds Banking Group deployed natural language technology into its retail banking customer service 2 years ago. This case study explores the challenges and opportunities of deploying a natural speech solution and the process of creating a mature speech-enabled IVR. The presenters share their experiences with the business drivers for deploying natural speech and key user-interface design features that made these benefits possible. Learn about surprises and challenges discovered during deployment and tuning and the impacts and opportunities to the call center brought by the new system.

D202 – What You Need to Know About Voice Biometrics
11:45 a.m - 12:30 p.m
David Claiborn, Senior Director, Product Design - United Health Group
Ellie Garrett, Senior Business Analyst, Business Solutions Services - United HealthCare

Voice biometrics is one of the fastest growing technologies for providing security of personal data access and communication. How does voice biometrics work? Is it easy to implement? How will customers use voice biometrics to access and communicate personal data? How will voice biometrics affect call center performance? Learn how a consumer health insurance organization solved these problems to provide a secure and trusted system.

SpeechTEK 2015 - Wednesday, August 19, 2015
C304 – PANEL: Designing Healthcare Conversations
2:45 p.m - 3:30 p.m
MODERATOR: Jenni McKienzie, Voice Interaction Designer - SpeechUsability
Rosanne Bonlander, Business Consultant - Humana Inc
Ellie Garrett, Senior Business Analyst, Business Solutions Services - United HealthCare
Tarah Knaresboro, VUI Design Manager, Product Design - Emmi Solutions

Attend this panel for a discussion of the vital role of voice interaction design in a variety of healthcare applications. The healthcare domain presents unique challenges in terms of confidentiality, persuading individuals to change behaviors, and users who may have physical or mental impairments. Healthcare experiences must not only be effective but show sensitivity to users’ anxiety over an upcoming procedure, fear and denial regarding a recent diagnosis, or confusion over a complicated new medication regime.

D301 – Create Your Own Intelligent Virtual Assistant Using Open Source Tools
10:45 a.m - 11:30 a.m
Michael McTear, Professor - Ulster University

There are some excellent tools on the market for creating your own virtual assistant; most are intended for corporate customers with large budgets. But there are also freely available open source tools that enable developers with some background in software development to create their own virtual assistants. We examine, show demos and videos, and compare currently available open source tools including the JiboAlive Toolkit, Virtual Human Toolkit, Teneo Studio, CMU’s Jasper for Raspberry Pi, Speaktoit, and Pandorabot.

D304 – PANEL: Trends and Lessons Learned in Visual IVR
2:45 p.m - 3:30 p.m
MODERATOR: K.W.'Bill' Scholz, President - NewSpeech LLC AVIOS
John Cray, VP, Product Management - Enghouse Interactive
Daryl Gambrell, Director of Hosted Solutions - Convergys
Theresa Szczurek, CEO and Co-Founder - Radish Systems, LLC

Written text is permanent, while spoken text is transient. Visual IVR offers users a visual representation of their IVR menus that can greatly improve the IVR experience. Can you add visual IVR capability to your existing voice-only IVR infrastructure to leverage your existing IVR call flows, help keep custom- er service cost down, and extend the life of your legacy IVR investments? What are the similarities and differences among the various approaches to visual IVR?




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