Getting practical about speech solutions
Harry Sheff's blog at Call Center Magazine has an interview today with Rex Stringham of EIG. It's primarily about hosted speech recognition services, but also covers voice UI design and the recent anti-IVR 'rampage'.
I've always been impressed with EIG's approach to voice UIs - forget the hype about speech recognition technology, they say, do what meets your business goals best. This can mean doing directed dialogs instead of natural language or even DTMF instead of speech... Wait, that doesn't sound very cool (and downright heretic to some speech technology and solutions vendors) but it's hard-won, practical advice from the real world, and it simply works better in many scenarios.
More of EIG's ideas about spoken dialog design, including some great ideas on reducing unnecessary dialog turns and optimizing task completion rates can be found in Bruce Balentine's book "How to Build a Speech Recognition Application".
