Speech Server 2007 Analytics Tools - a preview
The recent announcement of Speech Server 2007 included a promise of "Deep Caller Behavior Insight". Heck of a tag line that, so what's it all about? In a phrase: better analysis of what real callers are doing with your system. We've built a tool called the Speech Server Analytics and Tuning Studio that's integrated with the design tools in Visual Studio. It provides graphical reports of key metrics such as call volume, task completion rates and recognition accuracy, and from these you can drill through to sets of calls that have particular properties, then isolate individual sessions, tasks or dialog turns for audio playback or other analysis.
Here's a screenshot:
The tool is based on a SQL Server database (2000 and 2005 both supported), and in addition to preset filtering queries, you'll be able to write custom SQL directly for custom data reports or views of the items that you want to see. You can also use the SQL Reporting Services tools Report Designer and Report Builder to create custom reports from our database schema. (We'll be shipping reports in RDL format at final release time, but they're not in the Beta release.)
And we called the tool a "Studio" because there's more than just manual analysis capabilities. We've included some automatic problem finding tools and also an offline batch re-recognition capability to evaluate grammar and configuration changes on real data before going live.
We also announced the Speech Server Business Intelligence Tools, for management and reporting on large scale deployments. These are based on SQL Server 2005, and include packages to migrate Speech Server data into a data warehouse and OLAP cube for rapid and efficient report querying. They will use a lot of the SQL Server 2005 stack: Integration Services for the data migration (the ETL operations), Analysis Services for the multi-dimensional component and Reporting Services for the actual reports. Again, each component is customizable with the standard SQL tool set. (One particularly nifty thing about Analysis Services is the built-in data mining algorithms that will help anyone who's interested in doing deeper trend analysis or other data mining on their customers' speech behaviour.)
The MSS 2007 Beta is available next month, sign up here.
