Biographical Information
Deborah Dahl
Principal
Conversational Technologies
dahl@conversational-technologies.com
610-888-4532
Dr. Deborah Dahl is a consultant in speech and natural language technologies with 25 years of experience. She is an expert on standards, chairing the W3C's Multimodal Interaction Group, and serving as a member of the Voice Browser Group. She is the editor of the book Practical Spoken Dialog Systems.
Articles By Deborah Dahl
You'll never know whether a standard's a good fit if you don't try it out
For natural language tools to take on greater complexity, they'll need consistent, agreed-upon data annotations
With new technologies appearing all the time, standards must keep pace
A new W3C community group is exploring ways to make virtual assistant platforms interoperable
Information can be graphical or spoken, depending on context
In its 10th year, the competition yields apps for everyday use
Experts work to make speech solutions accessible to the cognitively impaired
Communication between objects is only the beginning
Wider use of apps offers broad potential
Watson and Siri are only the beginning.
New speech integration ideas show promise for 2012.
Standards, mobile phones help bring the Web to resource-constrained areas
The Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces specification opens door to collaborative multimodal apps
Posted 01 May 2011
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May/June 2011
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Deborah Dahl
Ultimate goal is to develop tools to better integrate speech with the Web.
Lab sessions gave companies the opportunity to showcase their latest products.
Now is the time to revisit and update some of the early voice standards.
VoiceXML 3.0 should be out by the end of this year.
As standards advance, things just work together better.
SCXML lets users travel through many states without leaving the phone
Posted 01 May 2009
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May 2009
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Deborah Dahl
Markup language makes it easier to develop telephony applications.
SpeechTEK attendees conduct hands-on evaluations.
W3C drafts the standard in multimodal architectures.
There's been a lot of negative press recently about poorly designed touchtone and speech-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) systems. I'm sorry to say that most of the problems that I've heard, read about, or personally experienced are real. To make matters worse, the situation is inexcusable because the underlying technology that powers these applications is very flexible and can do significantly more than what it is being used for today. Poor implementations are giving these systems a bad reputation, as has long been the case.
Speech interfaces in which users respond in their own words to open-ended prompts like "How may I help you?" are becoming more and more widely deployed. They are most frequently used in routing applications where the application's task is to identify the topic of the users' requests and transfer them to another part of the system where their requests can be addressed.
A good voice user interface (VUI) is central to any successful speech application. Although VUI's are made up of many components, if the persona is very memorable, users' perceptions of it can dominate their opinions about the entire system, overwhelming all other aspects of the system in the users' minds. As such, a good or bad persona can have major consequences for the success of a system. …
A good voice user interface (VUI) is central to any successful speech application. Although VUI's are made up of many components, if the persona is very memorable, users' perceptions of it can dominate their opinions about the entire system, overwhelming all other aspects of the system in the users' minds. As such, a good or bad persona can have major consequences for the success of a system. …
The contact center speech recognition market is maturing, but it is far from slowing down. On the contrary, it’s experiencing an upswing in sales that it hasn’t seen for at least three or four years. This market is consolidating, making room for a variety of new entrants and is finally growing in port size. According to Steve Cramoysan of Gartner DataQuest, “preliminary analysis of the 2004 speech recognition market reveals an overall growth in port…
For years, speech analytics have been used worldwide by security organizations to help government agencies identify potential risks and threats. In the past two years, contact centers have begun to use speech analytics applications to capture and structure customer communications. The applications analyze the structured data to identify customer trends and insights for the purpose of improving service quality, customer satisfaction, and generating new revenue. …
Rarely does a technical standard directly benefit end users. However, in the world of speech technologies they do. Standards facilitate innovation and reduction in the total cost of ownership of speech applications, but have been slow to market. Standards allow programmers to create platform-independent (and ideally vendor-independent) speech applications.
The visually-oriented graphical user interface (GUI) is a powerful, familiar, and highly functional approach to interacting with computers. But, as speech technology becomes increasingly available, it’s natural to think about how speech could be used in GUI interfaces as well as voice-only interfaces.
Posted 05 May 2003
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May/June 2003
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Deborah Dahl
The visually-oriented graphical user interface (GUI) is a powerful, familiar, and highly functional approach to interacting with computers. But, as speech technology becomes increasingly available, it's natural to think about how speech could be used in GUI interfaces as well as voice-only interfaces.
Posted 01 May 2003
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- by
Deborah Dahl
Many of speech recognition’s most important contributions to productivity have to do with mobility. For example, speech allows telephone users to simply say the name of the person they are calling and be connected, a big advantage for cellular phone users in the car.
Microsoft and Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products have announced a broad strategic alliance designed to accelerate development of the next generation of voice-enabled computing on the Microsoft Windows platform. <@SM>