The little things that make it all worthwhile
It's the unexpected compliments that keep me coming in to work every morning. Here's what The DiaryMaster, founder of OpenDiary* had to say in a sidebar yesterday about those of us who work on speech recognition:
Somebody please tell me where I can find the team of people who are working to "advance" the technology that is used for speech recognition at customer service call centers. Have you seen "Constantine" (...)? You know the demon spawn that crawl around on all fours, are missing the tops of their heads, and spend their time trying to trap souls and drag them into the Abyss? There's a team of those guys, sitting in some room somewhere, writing the code for this "improved" technology.
Hmm, do I detect a note of animosity here?
The post goes on to sing the praises of good old touch-tone technology and vent about the attempted anthropomorphism of the system. Great data points. DiaryMaster met a speech recognition application whose human persona annoyed him, whose attempts to explain his options frustrated him, and whose giving him another try after a misrecognition drove him off the edge. Result: one jarred-off user. Locus of hatred for said user: developers of the core technology. I hear examples like this all the time, and it drives home that no matter how good the core recognizer technology is, it's the UI, as the 'face' of the system, that drives judgments of the technology. What is more interesting, however, is that the DiaryMaster doesn't blame the company behind the IVR system at all (unlike the current popular uprising that is gethuman.com), as if they were blamelessly driven to deploy the technology against their will...
Anyway, to answer your question DiaryMaster, you can find some of us here in Building 17, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, 98052. I haven't seen Constantine, but hey, now you mention it, not everyone is able to walk fully upright at all times, and you could definitely say there are some oddly shaped heads around here...
*Non-disclaimer: I don't know The DiaryMaster. This post turned up on an RSS feed I read for random blogs containing the phrase 'speech recognition'.
