Helping users
Just as good IVR systems let customers press zero to talk to a person, you should build speech recognition systems so users can easily navigate between major sections using specific keywords.
It's not a bad idea to give the system a distinct name that people can use to alert the system they're going to enter a direct command.
For example, instead of having to hit the * key to back out of a series of IVR menus, a user might be able to jump from a travel booking to a weather report simply by saying "HAL, tell me the current weather in Adelaide".
The net effect is to construct the NLSR system as a cyber-persona that understands full sentences and can speak back the information to the customer in a natural voice.
This approach will engender familiarity with the system as well as saving users from getting lost in the mire of poorly designed IVR systems.
Although it will take customers a while to get used to a new system, in the long term the appeal of being able to skip long phone queues should convince most callers to get aboard.
Since there will always be the inevitable problems, make sure customers can always get help from a human operator if they need it--either by pressing a specific key or by not responding when prompted.
"We don't want customers to get up, sing and dance like they've just had a mind-altering revelation," says Paul Magee, managing director of speech recognition vendor VeCommerce.
"The frontier is making the technology work in a way that makes sense to people. If they can just do a transaction without them even noticing it, we've done our job."
"Doing this is not a computing issue," Magee continues. "At the core, the technology works. The real issue is layering a real set of rules that allows customers to say what they want they way it makes sense to them. This is in the design of the application, error handling, and all of the other grey and very humanistic issues around deploying the technology."
Use your voice everywhere
Most of the current attention in the speech recognition market is focused on company call centres. As the technology continues to worm its way into Australia's business psyche, however, it will quickly extend its reach into a variety of other applications.
Sydney company Holly, for one, offers a hosted voice recognition service that's being bundled in several forms for various customers. The most widely used is a retail information service targeted at mobile professionals who call in via their mobiles to get current stock prices and other information.
Citing the high cost of building brand recognition, however, Holly's directors have focused the company on selling the voice portal's core technologies in packages for integration with companies' call centres and back-end systems.
"There's a large potential to replace IVR systems, and to a certain degree some call centre services, with things based on voice recognition," says chief operating officer Michael Atkinson.
"We're getting to the point where the functionality is 80 percent of what people want, and since it's a fully open system we can go to systems integrators to customise it and deliver the other 20 percent."
