Biographical Information

Articles by Nancy Jamison

From Agent Assist to Employee Assist

Copilot apps are proliferating, and they mean business.

The Contact Center Supervisor Workspace Gets a Makeover

From analytics to Copilot, this desktop is supercharged.

AI Is Making UCC and the Contact Center into an Increasingly Powerful Combo

Teaming up these AI-fueled solutions yields a variety of shared capabilities and benefits.

Agent Hiring in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence can help address agent churn before it happens.

The AI Contact Center Is Finally Here

Natively integrated capabilities abound in core contact center functions.

Conversational AI Is Becoming More Practical

As a spring conference displayed, the technology is improving and the use cases growing.

Enduring AI-Powered Retail Trends for 2022

Digital engagement will continue to enhance retail, both in the store and online.

Speech and AI: From Tipping Point to Table Stakes

Gone are the days when adding virtual assistants was enough.

Automated Solutions Have Become Work-from-Home Agents, Too

Adoption and interest in AI-infused capabilities got better because things got worse

Infusing AI and Speech into the Mobile Retail Customer Experience

AI-powered apps are employing speech as part of an all-important omnichannel approach

Augment or Automate? With AI, There’s a Place for Both

Augmented intelligence is the AI path for improving, not replacing, the human workforce

Amid the AI Fervor, a Case for Automating with a Human Touch

When bots and live agents tackle customer service together, CX and the bottom line benefit

Healthcare CX Is Increasingly Fraught, but Speech Tech Provides an Answer

AI-powered bots, armed with natural language understanding, are giving vital help to users navigating healthcare

Voice Tools Could Help Brick-and-Mortar Retail Remain Relevant

Stores need to embrace technology to help the customer experience and bring back shoppers

Robotic Process Automation Reduces Human Grunt Work

Chatbots and IVAs get all the ink, but RPA applications are vital to a smooth contact center operation

Virtual Assistants Make Speech Technology Relevant Worldwide

Customers everywhere are growing increasingly comfortable talking to IVAs

Thanks, Siri! Speech Technology Is Remaking Customer Interactions

The digital transformation of customer care is coming, and speech technology will be at the forefront

Speech Technology in the IoT Era

As companies strive to build a connected world, obstacles persist—and so do opportunities

Technical Support, Speech Technologies, and the Internet of Things

The emerging SIO category offers a balance of assistance for agents and users

Big Data in the Contact Center

Speech analytics is just the beginning.

Omnichannel Contact Centers Embrace Speech

Suddenly, the technology is everywhere.

Enter Cross-Channel Proactive Customer Engagement

Being proactive is one thing. Getting it right is another.

Mobile Customer Care Just Got Stickier

Siri's got company, and there's more coming.

IVR Relinquishes the Gatekeeper Role

One company blends human interaction with speech self-service.

Speech-Enhanced Customer Service Gets a New Look

Multichannel solutions meld proactive outbound alerts and notifications with inbound capabilities

Year of Speech Coming? It’s Already Here

Technical hurdles remain, but the technology has become ubiquitous

A Matter of Time

Has two years improved voice verification growth?

Speech, Not Silence, Is Golden

Personal eyewear is a product destined to move fast.

Mobility Ubiquity

Can speech make it on mobile devices?

The Tipping Point of Speech Proliferation, Part II

Speech gains in UC and mobile applications.

The Tipping Point of Speech Proliferation

A rudimentary history traces speech since the 1990s

Speech Shows Its Worth in a Down Economy

Spending is sometimes needed to save money or generate revenue.

Nuance Roars into New Markets

New Dragon release puts dictation into the mobile workforce.

Does Anyone Care About Voice Verification

The industry is at a tipping point of a broader deployment

The Case for Easy Speech: Metaphor Solutions and Planet Payment

Quick, simple, and secure is the winning formula for retail IVRs.

Inside SRI's STAR Labs

Developing great technologies for public and private use

Innovations: Apple's New TTS

Synthesized speech might seem like a misnomer

Datria Fast Forwards Warehouse Speech Opportunities

Solution is the first to use IP phones rather than wearable computers.

Speech Technology with Impact

With CallWave, I can see what you're saying.

Interactive Digital: The Effective Use of Adaptation in VUI Design

Adjust audio responses based on caller preferences and more.

Innovative Research in the Labs, Part VII: SpeechCycle

SpeechCycle is young, but it still brings together innovative research and experienced speech scientists to deliver valuable products

Innovative Research in the Labs, Part VI: AT&T

Research labs are available on every vendors' site, but AT&T stands out as a research lab in and for itself

Innovative Research in the Labs Part V: Intervoice Center for Conversational Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas

This month we look at a marriage of private industry and education. Within the Human Language Technology Research Institute (HLTRI) at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) are eight centers of specialized, cross-disciplinary research on human language technology, one of which is the Intervoice Center for Conversational Technologies (ICCT). UTD, one of the fastest growing universities in the country, focuses primarily on science, engineering and business. A core research area, HLTRI, has some of the world's top researchers in computational linguistics, with award-winning experts in various aspects of text processing—specifically question and answer systems.

Innovative Research in the Labs Part IV - Carnegie Mellon University

Taking a more academically-oriented approach to research, this month I reviewed the speech groups at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in Pittsburgh, Pa. Centered in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) in the School of Computer Science are two large research groups, the Speech Group and the international center for Advanced Communications Technologies (interACT). LTI conducts research and provides graduate education for all aspects of language technology and information management.

Innovations - Speech Technology With Impact

Innovations - Speech Technology with Impact: Innovative Research in the Labs Part II - IBM Research

IBM is certainly at the forefront of what this column is about - innovation. Whether research results are near term or in development for decades, they innovate in new areas and push the envelope in existing ones.

Innovations: Speech Technology with Impact - What Is Going on in the Labs?

What Is Going on in the Labs? The focus of the next few issues of this column will be less on innovative new products, but rather what is going on behind closed (or open) doors in research and development (R&D) in the labs. Speech technologies in particular have had a long academic research history, highlighted by the exceedingly long time it took for initial research - perhaps 30-40 years prior - to bear fruit as viable

Innovations: Speech Technology with Impact - New Company, New Breakthrough

At the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas this week, Sensory, Inc., (http://www.sensoryinc.com /) debuted their new subsidiary, 3Dmsg, which is developing technology and applications for the cell phone and wireless handset markets. Ho hum, you say, but it's not so. 3Dmsg - yes - that is 3D messaging - is about to do for the improvement of personalization and avatars, what advances in intonation, accents, and accuracy did for text-to-speech. …

Innovations: Speech Technology with Impact - Double Feature

We have a double feature this month. First up is an upgrade to stealthy, but steadfast Empirix, with a new release of their Hammer CallMasterTM testing tools, now tuned to testing speech applications. Second is the application of these tools in action at bridgeSpeak, a company that provides IVR voice self-service solutions to auto dealerships. …

Speech Technology with Impact - Avaya Voice Portal 3.0 and Dialog Designer 3.0

For 20 some odd years now telecom industry personnel have talked about the hopeful convergence of telecom and IT, and the emergence of blended manager roles. They have talked and talked and talked. For most of that time it didn't happen, or at least not quickly.

Speech Technology with Impact - Speech Analytics Evolves a Step Further

Speech analytics (SA) is the application of speech technologies to the analysis of discourse, whether the speech consists of recorded calls from a contact center, wiretap, or some other form of media. A dozen or more vendors are now marketing such analytics, solo or in conjunction with complimentary products, primarily to companies for use in contact centers.

Innovations: Speech Technology with Impact

From the editor: Welcome to Innovations - Speech Technology with Impact. Normally in each issue we have a section for notable press releases, but over time this has grown redundant with our Speech Technology Magazine NewsBlasts. So starting this month we are replacing press releases with a new column on innovations or speech technology with impact.

Speech in the Travel Industry

Vertical market applications are a subject dear to the hearts of marketers in the contact center and speech technology field. Finance, healthcare and education are typical of the "low hanging fruit" vendors have long focused on, with others, such as government, getting attention as the next potential for the big sales kill. Although there are some surprisingly interesting applications associated with these verticals, as a whole they aren't the most exciting customer-facing applications out there.

Security versus Privacy

Nancy Jamison reports on a survey completed earlier this year by Jamison Consulting and BrandMarketing Services Ltd. studying the public’s awareness and acceptance of biometrics. While security is a big issue, privacy is a concern.

Speech in the Warehouse

Speech applications in warehousing and merchandise distribution have not received a great deal of attention. That doesn't mean there aren't some significant developments going on in the industry as Nancy Jamison points out in this article about how speech can help optimize workforce productivity at the point of picking and packing.

Listen Up! Big Brother is Talking to You

Listen up! The government is talking to you and being helpful in the process. This might sound strange to anyone who has sat on hold waiting for a government agency representative.

Listen Up! Big Brother is Talking to You

Listen up! The government is talking to you and being helpful in the process. This might sound strange to anyone who has sat on hold waiting for a government agency representative. Ever called the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) or Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)? You know what I mean.

Beyond Recognition, to Understanding

You could make a pretty good case that the birthplace of the speech recognition industry is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Computer Science. Several leading speech recognition companies owe their core technology to developments at MIT, and it remains an “idea factory” for the speech recognition industry.