Today’s call was more like Excruciating Update, though. The call started off on a bad note when it didn’t detect me pressing 1 to indicate that I was a human, as opposed to an answering machine. The first couple of prompts were okay, but then the gaps between the prompts .. got …. longer …….. and ………………. longer. Nearing the end of the details for the second flight, each prompt was spaced out by at least 10 seconds. That is pretty painful, since each digit in the flight number is read as a separate prompt.

Most people would have hung up by then, but I work in the business, so I wanted to listen in to the bitter end. Which happened during the second flight details.

Halfway through playing the arrival time, the notification app either crashed or bailed out and switched to a message informing me that they were having technical difficulties and I should call a toll free number to speak to a person. The third party provider for this service (West bought Centerpost) was presumably having serious load issues that slowed down their servers dramatically.

I got about half of the 16 right. I would have gotten nearly three quarters of them correct if I had always gone with my first guess. I was too suspicious that the obvious answer wasn’t the right answer.

• Enterprise and contact center trends that are driving new investments in IVR/speech applications
• Best practices for determining the most beneficial activities to offer your customers via your IVR/speech application
• How to realize the greatest return from your IVR/speech investments
• Do’s and don’ts for IVR applications – what activities and functions should and should not be offered by an IVR/speech system
• Which parts of a business outside the call center can benefit from speech applications

It was a lot of fun and I hope I was able to provide the attendees with interesting and useful information, specifically about what we have learned at Voxify in our many customer deployments. I thought the other panelists did a good job, though I was surprised that none of them named specific customers. I think it is really helpful to people looking to deploy speech applications to hear about the successful experiences of specific customers in businesses very similar to theirs.

You can can hear a recording of the webcast (registration required) on the CRMXchange site.

The article might give a reader the impression that not much is going on with advancements in emotional speech prosody in commercially available text-to-speech engines, but anyone who has listened to a demo of the Loquendo TTS engine would tell you differently.

I do have to disagree with one of his other IVR-related posts where he states that:

But when a rider calls in to find out how to get from Downtown to Highland mall in the shortest time possible, an IVR will not do a good job of handling this question (a lot of human judgment and discretion is required which an IVR just can’t muster).

You would be surprised how well a speech app can handle that kind of problem. Of course, it won’t be cheap, as you have to think through the common starting and destination points callers might use, know when to ask for more detail (downtown isn’t sufficient info for providing directions unless you are in Mayberry RFD), algorithms for computing shortest time based on the schedules, etc., but it can definitely be done. Now, there are certainly many customer service kinds of apps that are very difficult to handle with a speech app, but directions is not one of them.

In deciding whether it is worth building an app for this function, you have to look at the total number of minutes of calls like this being handled by live agents. If the number is low (and “low” varies with the complexity of the problem, and thus the solution cost, of course), then it may better to leave the calls to a small number of trained agents who can handle many other types of calls. But, once you want to offer this service beyond regular working hours or if you expect the call traffic for this type of call to be very spiky, it may be worth building an app to take the calls.

The thing I found most interesting is that the Voicemail to Text product page states that Nuance’s transcription software is supported by over 3,000 human transcriptionists. Well, they don’t specifically say human, but I think that’s a safe bet. I would have thought that if any company could completely automate the transcription process, it would be Nuance. Then again, I often can’t understand all of the words in the voicemail messages I receive, and last time I checked, I was human.

Recently I interviewed for a position at Voxify an engineer who worked on such a service at a company that develops unified messaging software. They were trying to fully automate the voicemail transcription process, though they seemed to be targeting for a much less complete transcription. That would still be useful if you receive a lot of voicemail messages, as it might allow you to better prioritize the order in which you go through the backlog. I get upwards of three voicemails a week from my retinue of admirers, so this isn’t such a problem for me, though it would let me quickly skip through the majority of those messages that are wrong numbers.

Microsoft moved Speech Server into Office Communications Server last year, and really doesn’t seem to be promoting it as a standalone product, even though it can still be installed separately. Although I see virtually no push by Microsoft, or even their partners, to sell Speech Server into large contact centers, I’m still a little surprised Gartner dropped them.

We’ve been doing some testing on Speech Server at Voxify, and overall it works quite well. Getting it to work with our Asterisk-based PBX was a nightmare, but otherwise the install went pretty smoothly. Recognition performance using Microsoft’s ASR is generally similar to Nuance OSR, though recognition is very slow when doing nbest recognition for even medium sized values of n. Microsoft’s fairly faithful compliance with the VoiceXML standard (we find issues with every VXML browser vendor we have worked with) was another very pleasant surprise. The best surprise was the licensing costs. It is amazingly inexpensive considering the quantity and quality of features it includes.

One of my biggest concerns about Speech Server is that activity in discussion forums and blogs regarding the product has dwindled dramatically (at least in the places I have looked) over the last year. Without Microsoft pushing Speech Server, I think there will need to be pretty strong community support for it to gain a foothold. It would be really too bad if it ends up getting buried in the unified communication product line at Microsoft.

The rest of the report contained no surprises. Genesys is listed as the clear leader, and that is definitely what I have seen in the market. Acquiring VoiceGenie was a brilliant move on their part, and they have very good offerings for both enterprises and large VXML hosting providers. Nonetheless, there continue to be interesting developments at Nortel, Avaya and Voxeo, among others.

As Nancy points out, this is the kind of outbound call that customers actually do want to receive. We’re working on a lot of stuff like this, so hopefully more of the outbound calls people receive in the future will be helpful calls, instead of just telemarketing, collections and surveys with no compensation for your time.

The outbound calling apps we build also go way beyond “read-only” notification calls. These are interactive calls that let you do things like ask to have a message repeated or reschedule the call for a more convenient time. Rescheduling a call using DTMF (i.e., pressing digits on a keypad) is terrible comparing to doing it with speech. For this application, speech recognition is also used to prompt for how you want to receive your check in confirmation, check in for multiple flights, collect information about infants or passengers under the age of thirteen, ask about upgrades, and a lot more.

Also, SMS has taken off in the US to the point that there is now a huge number of potential customers who would be interested in getting the gist of a voicemail texted to them. There is also a fast growing population of users with phones capable of email access who would want the full transcription emailed to them so they could review it and potentially respond. If the voicemail message contains things you might want to write down, like phone numbers, names, addresses, etc., the automatic transcription saves you even more time. Of course, that assumes the transcription is at least as correct as what you would have written down.

Of course, SMS has been popular for much longer in other countries, but language is obviously an issue. Sure there are a lot of potential customers in Finland, but that means you need a recognizer with a very good Finnish language model. But that’s going to help you out only in Finland. Obviously, tapping into a large country that uses the same language as several other large countries is pretty desirable when you are trying to really scale up a business.

At Utterz, however, voice blogging by phone is just one of the services they offer. They even offer dial-in numbers outside the US. And even better, it’s free.

One thing I’m concerned about from reading the FAQ is that it looks like they just use caller ID to determine who you are when you call in. Caller ID is easy to spoof, so it would be simple for me to post a voice recording to someone else’s Utter page. If they had configured connections to their blog, my post would even show up there.

Another downside is that it appears that the voice app is just a DTMF app. That really limits what they can do. For example, one of the features I keep planning to add to PhoneBlogger is to let you tag or categorize the voice post. With a speech app that would be very easy to do. Some of the blogging APIs let you retrieve a list of all the existing categories. It’s trivial to those into a grammar and prompt the caller to say one of them. Good luck specifying a category with a DTMF app (press 1 for LOLcats, press 2 for flying spaghetti monster, …, press 19 for fishsticks are go, …). Actually, you could do better by having the caller enter the first two digits from the phone keypad that map to the first two letters of the desired category. Unless the caller has a lot of popular categories starting with the same letter, the app would then have to present at worst a short disambiguation list. Still, a speech app would be much better, especially if you want to support adding multiple tags to a post.