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Marshall Harrison - "the gotspeech guy"

Site news, Speech Server insight and assorted ramblings
Bringo!

"Stop talking to machines and talk to a real human" - that's the unofficial motto of a new service at NoPhoneTrees.com. They are in beta launch at the moment but claim that they can "walk the tree" for you and they currently handle over 150 companies in several different categories.  They will place the call for you then navigate the phone tree and call you back and connect you.

Personally I have mixed feelings about things like this and things like and gethuman. I can see the need for them with all of the badly designed Speech/IVR interfaces that are out there. One part of me hates to see people circumventing the interface to get to an operator but the other side sees the need. If we all did a better job designing our interface then there would be no need for sites like these.

I'm glad that speech is becoming more ubiquitous and that the tools are making it easier for developers. OCS Speech Server 2007 is a great example of how easy, convenient and powerful the tools have become. But with all of this power comes two problems, everybody wants to get involved and most people don't know how to do good design. 

To quote Peter Parker's Uncle Ben - "With great power comes great responsibility". If you are going to use these tools and call yourself a speech developer then you should learn how to do it right. This is where GotSpeech and other sites  can play a big part in shaping our industry. It behooves each of us to do the best that we can. If we don't know how to design a good interface then we should take it upon ourselves to learn. Blade Kotelly's book The Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice makes a great starting point.

I don't want to discourage or put down the developers of NoPhoneTrees and the other sites. I just long for the day when they are no longer necessary. That will mean that we are finally doing our jobs right.

So, tell me what you think.

Posted: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 5:32 PM by marshallharrison

Comments

Bill_Ryan said:

I've beaten this point into the ground but it's one of the few times I have a good point ;-)  If you ask 100 developers out there "Do you write unfriendly software?  Do you write sucky software?  Are your interfaces unintuitive or counterintiutive" you'll  not hear any of them say "Yep" that's me.  Yet ask 100users if they've used counterintuitive stuff and they'll all say yes. So where does it come from?  The point is that most developers think their stuff is friendly and in any room of developers 99% fancy themsselves usability experts.

VUI is nowhere near as developed as Windows or Web apps and unfortunately, when something first comes out, it takes a while for people to realize how bad some of their designs are.

As far as the "if we did our jobs right we wouldn't need stuff like that argument goes", you couldn't be more right.  Products like that are a response to bad VUI design. What would really be cool is having a separate tree that gave you shortcuts for  stuff - so that if you call something regularly, you can just learn what the codes are and navigate to it directly.  Or they should have a code that lets you turn off "Fluff factor"  like "Hello and welcome to _________ speech recogntion system. This system allows you to gain access to your information 24 hours a day,  365 days a year".  One company that I call daily has this as their greeting.  Just like you can turn off the Intros to Flash sites, they should have that option for stuff like this.

The goal is to have a system that no one would ever want to circumvent b/c it's just so efficient and useful there's no need.  That takes a lot of thought, but *** you learn to appreciate it.  It'd be cool if more places had two different numbers, one for experienced users and one for the general public.  But I digress.  Anyway, we've got a long way to go and just about every day I encounter a VUI system that is just painful.  

Probably the worst thing that many companies do is, have data available if you talk to a person that you can't get to through the VUI.  So this forces you to sit through the first pass of results, then ask for an operator and then have them look up whatever and tell you about it. UPS, Fedex and USPS have all at one point, had tons of info if you could get through to an operator that wasn't available via the VUI or web.  But they tell you before they transfer you "The Operator won't have any more information".  

# May 17, 2007 4:41 PM
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