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Articles by Dan Miller

Speech Technology’s Continually Evolving Confidence Game

Advances in cognitive computing seek to improve on traditional rules-based algorithms and probability models—but the latter still know their stuff

Companies Will Need to Make the Most of #VoiceFirst

Voice will become the interface of choice in industries far outside consumer electronics, and the possibilities are endless.

Speech Processing or Natural Language Understanding? You Be the Judge

Both are important, but in today's increasingly voice-first world, which one is more so?

The Next Stop for the Voice-First Movement? Customer Care

The growth of Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri means that customer care is coming (back) to the voice channel

Voice-First Bots and the Future of IVR

The success of Siri, Alexa, and the like can only benefit IVR solutions

Voice Biometrics Grows to Meet Global Challenges

Today's solutions are more accurate and easier to use and implement.

Speech-Enabled Mobile Search Marches On

Free services expand as technology moves out of the niche.

Apple's Ironic Product Positioning

Saying Hello to the new iPhone will go unanswered

Banking on Voice Biometrics

Regulations are enforcing stricter authentication for financial institutions, generating more opportunity for voice biometrics

Season's Greetings

Automated speech VUIs(voice user interfaces) have exposed us to a variety of greetings: Hey there! How may I help you? In your own words, describe the purpose of your call. Please press or say your account number. And the ever popular, This call may be monitored for training purposes. Well, at least most firms are getting better than the Your call is important to us, but not much.

Stacked-Unified Communications Revisited

Last June, Microsoft held an event in San Francisco where top executives demonstrated new software and hardware components that round out its Unified Communications (UC) solutions stack, and, to use Bill Gates' terminology, "make it easy for people to reach each other using the mode of communication that is the most productive, on the device that is most convenient." Its partners - including LG-Nortel, Polycom, and Thomson Telecom (based in Australia) - set out to define hardware and software that fill out a solution stack for enterprise IP-telephony. Other members of its hardware consortium include Motorola, Samsung, Plantronics, Tatung, Logitech and Siemens.

Adventures in Speech Mobilization

Heard the News Today? Oh Boy!

Bringing automated speech to a vertical, like health care, is not merely transcending a doctor's illegible handwriting or obviating the need for off-shore transcription services. The opportunity lies in rendering well-understood, repetitive activities as XML-based scripts in a way that leverages an installed base of processors, applications and databases.

Coping with the Terrible 2000s: CAT's Prospects in 2006

We are now half way through the first decade of the new millennium. It's time to take stock of the factors that have had the greatest influence on automated speech's progress into enterprise and service provider IT infrastructures as a major component of Conversational Access Technologies (CAT).

Speech Automation's False Choices

As a growing number of enterprises make their conversion to VoIP (Voice over IP) or IP telephony, the notion of automated speech is getting short shrift.

Revisiting the ROI of Speech

Back in June 2002, while I was a senior vice president with The Kelsey Group, we conducted a research study on "The ROI of Speech." A select group of relatively large companies, primarily in the financial services and catalogue sales sectors provided some impressive numbers that have been baked into countless presentations delivered by the peripatetic SpeechWorks/Nuance sales force. …