Can Mobile and IVR Coexist?

Customer interaction technologies should support one another, not compete.

It's a Persona, Not a Personality

In IVR design, it should be about finding the right voice, not the right character.

Enterprise Strategy: Success on All Levels

When implementing a speech solution, everyone needs to be on the same page

Advanced Analytics Offer Greater Precision

The latest technology goes beyond simple audio mining for words and phrases.

The Call Heard 'Round the World'

Don't let cultural and language differences stymie your IVR

The Art and Science of War

U.S. forces in Iraq are stepping up field testing of speech translation devices.

Not Everyone Has a Phone Voice

The right voice is everything on an IVR, auto attendant, automatic call distributor, or voicemail system.

On Good Speaking Terms

When dealing with a machine, it shouldn't sound too much like a human

The First 100 Days of Deployment

The design and development phase of your speech self-service application is complete. The system is installed and a rigorous process of usability and user-acceptance testing has been performed. Now what? How do you ensure that when you flip the switch your customers will be able to successfully use the system the way you envisioned? That is what the next 100 days after the initial deployment are all about.

Ivy League IVR

Respect-it can be a difficult, yet highly desirable value to attain. Most people want respect; it's a basic human motivation to be treated with dignity.

Speech in Multichannel Customer Service

It has been a longstanding debate: Do you spend a lot of money on high-quality customer service, or risk upsetting customers with a low-cost approach? The answer, which is not always simple, may require a blend of both, as more companies are including speech-self service as part of their multichannel customer service initiatives.

Eleven Tips to Improve IVR Effectiveness

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.

Is Paul English Right?

Why is it when Citibank launches an ad campaign saying its customers can press "0" to talk to a human, it becomes big news? Have we reached a point where the ability to reach an operator is that big a deal? By now, virtually everyone knows the magic phrase: "Hello. Your call is important to us. If you are an existing customer, please press or say one."

Creating a Successful Spanish Speech System

VUI Review Testing - Is It Part of Your Speech Best Practices?

VRT [VUI Review Testing] leverages the VUI designer's heuristic knowledge of what has or hasn't worked in the past, based on prior usability feedback.  If VRT is skipped, there may be known issues still lurking that could have been caught through VRT.

TTS and Personalities: Expressing True Attitude

In order for expressive TTS to be effective, the voice, script, and affective tone all must support the intent and match the customer.

Speech and J2EE - A Foundation for More Creative Dialog Design

Repurposing existing data for speech is frequently a new concept for IT managers whose expectations have been shaped by the proprietary speech systems exclusively available in pre-VoiceXML days.  Speech industry standards such as VoiceXML can take full advantage of J2EE to allow designers of speech applications to more easily leverage data that already exists with protocols considered by most organizations to be standards-based. 

Choosing Hardware for Your Speech Application

It is debatable whether speech technologies have become mainstream and, certainly, a great deal of the attention is based on skepticism. Nevertheless, more and more companies are looking at what speech can do for them and their customers.

Speech Applications Security: Protecting Your Business and Your Customers From Hackers

With unauthorized access to and theft of customer information on the rise, speech-enabled customer care systems present a new set of security parameters for companies to address. If ignored, a security breach in these systems could be devastating from both an economic and customer trust and loyalty perspective.

Internet Technologies in the Contact Center

The telecommunications industry is undergoing a major change from proprietary hardware-based systems to software-based systems built on open standards. Standards such as VoiceXML, CCXML, SIP, Service-Oriented Architecture, and other Internet technologies are radically changing how contact center applications are built and deployed. But these enabling technologies are only the means to an end. The real goals of applying new technologies to the contact center remain: improving the customer's experience (Happy customers are better than disgruntled,…