2005: Speech blog posts of the year
In the spirit of the year in review, here are 5 random posts from the blogdom of speech solutions that caught my eye in 2005:
- "Lost passwords on a Sunday Morning"
Nice anecdote from Terry Gold about an employee of "Really Big Consulting Firm" who has to call his IT guy from the airport on a Sunday morning to get network access. A good advertisement for automated password reset applications, nicely highlighting the insecurity (and unsociability) of existing manual approaches.
- "When Voice Applications Fail"
VoiceinGov.org's Mark Headd dissects the poor voice UI of the Medicare help line in a thoughtful analysis of its menu routing interface. He provides some sound advice on how they could get it right -- general advice that applies beyond this application to many others with menu routing dialogs.
- "Rethinking customer service"
Jon Udell's take on channel consolidation in the customer service industry, hoping for a unification of interaction modalities driven by the integration of voice and data. And proposing that "[in] a world of near-optimal information flow, human exception handlers -- the resource we invented IVR to conserve -- will be one of the few remaining ways to differentiate and add value."
- "Going home"
"I am emotionally, and physically exhausted. I have nothing left..." Dan Manrique's post after 7 days building and deploying the Katrina Safe application in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Katrina Safe was jointly developed in a volunteer effort by employees of Microsoft and Intervoice using Microsoft Speech Server.
- "Robotic Animals: implanting mice with speech recognition"
This defies a summary. Questions explode out of this experiment that keep one awake at night.
And there's still a few days to go...
