In late 2002, I thought it would be cool to build an application that allowed you to blog by phone. Tools, libraries and hosted services were a bit more limited back then, but after a few months of learning, coding and debugging, I managed to release the first version of PhoneBlogger in January 2003. Along… Read More »
I got an outbound notification call from United this morning about a change to an upcoming flight. When United introduced Easy Update years ago, I was a big fan. I even sent email to United customer service to find out which vendor implemented it for them. Today’s call was more like Excruciating Update, though. The… Read More »
In a comment on another post, a friend pointed out a fun game from Language Trainers Group for guessing accents . You listen to someone read a few lines from a poem and then you answer a multiple choice question to identify their country of origin. For a couple of them, you can get bonus… Read More »
This past Monday I was one of the panelists for the CRMXchange Great Debate webcast on Speech Self Service. We covered the following topics, and a bit more, during the webcast: 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… Read More »
There’s a very detailed (and long) article on the state and future of speech recognition and speech synthesis in the New York Times from late June. Although the prognosis is not that positive, it is written almost with the challenge of a Turing test for speech recognition, i.e., a computer recognizing the semantics of human… Read More »
The Austin Capital Metro CIO deserves a lot of credit for owning up on the Austin CapMetro blog to some major issues with their IVR applications for bus schedules, etc. It sounds like they have some grammar definition, timeout setting and confidence level setting issues with their app, though it is harder to know for… Read More »
When I posted a couple days ago about Spinvox taking in a very large funding round, I missed an announcement that same day about Nuance’s new voicemail to text service, which they have decided to cryptically call Voicemail to Text. Nuance is providing this service only through telecom carriers. The thing I found most interesting… Read More »
An article in Speech Technology magazine reports that in the most recent update to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IVRs, Microsoft Speech Server and Nuance Voice Portal got dropped. The disappearance of NVP is no surprise, since Nuance announced at their Conversations conference over two years ago that they would no longer enhance it. Microsoft moved… Read More »
Nancy Jamison posted a nice write up on her blog about a recent Voxify webcast where Voxify presented with Continental on a new outbound voice app we just rolled out for Continental that calls customers up to 24 hours before their flight and offers to check them into their flight. It’s an especially great app… Read More »
SpinVox certainly has come a long way in the last few years since I checked out their service for converting voicemails to text. They launched at nearly the perfect time. Large vocabulary speech recognizers have been around for a long time, but in the last few years they have become particularly plentiful and cheap. Also,… Read More »