Book description
Most people have experienced an automated speech-recognition system when calling a company. Instead of prompting callers to choose an option by entering numbers, the system asks questions and understands spoken responses. With a more advanced application, callers may feel as if they're having a conversation with another person. Not only will the system respond intelligently, its voice even has personality.
The Art and Business of Speech Recognition examines both the rapid emergence and broad potential of speech-recognition applications. By explaining the nature, design, development, and use of such applications, this book addresses two particular needs:
Business managers must understand the competitive advantage that speech-recognition applications provide: a more effective way to engage, serve, and retain customers over the phone.
Application designers must know how to meet their most critical business goal: a satisfying customer experience.
Author Blade Kotelly illuminates these needs from the perspective of an experienced, business-focused practitioner. Among the diverse applications he's worked on, perhaps his most influential design is the flight-information system developed for United Airlines, about which Julie Vallone wrote in Investor's Business Daily: "By the end of the conversation, you might want to take the voice to dinner."
If dinner is the analogy, this concise book is an ideal first course. Managers will learn the potential of speech-recognition applications to reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, enhance the company brand, and even grow revenues. Designers, especially those just beginning to work in the voice domain, will learn user-interface design principles and techniques needed to develop and deploy successful applications. The examples in the book are real, the writing is accessible and lucid, and the solutions presented are attainable today.
0321154924B12242002
Table of contents
- Copyright
- Praise for the Art and Business of Speech Recognition
- Preface
- The Background
-
The Process of Designing Speech-Recognition Systems
- Research
- Developing the Design
-
Writing Effective Prompts
- The Language of Asking Questions
- The Art of Writing Perfect Prompts
- Writing Prompts for Elegance, Speed, and Value
- Getting Callers to Focus on the Essentials
- Some Subtleties of Prompt Writing
- Top Five Good Tenets for Writing Prompts
- Top Five Mistakes When Writing Prompts
- Where We've Been—Where We're Going
-
Production And Branding
- Notes About Implementation and Programming
- Production
- Prompt Creation—Text-to-Speech and Recorded Voices
- Casting
- Directing Voice Talents
- The Art of Recording Prompts
- Other Thoughts on Directing
- Concatenative Prompt Recording
- Some Metrics and Technical Notes
- Audio Icons
- Branding
- Where We've Been—Where We're Going
- Usability Testing
- Deployment
-
Applied Knowledge
-
Case Studies
- United Airlines: Shortcuts for Frequent Fliers
- United Airlines: Providing Extra Help For Those Who Need It
- Continental Airlines: A Different Approach to Flight Information
- A Top-Five Investment Management Company: Handling Complex Two-Choice Questions
- An Online Brokerage Firm: Managing More Complex Tasks
- An Online Brokerage Firm: Preferences and Other Rarely Used Functions
- A Regional Telephone Company: Dealing With Legal Notices and Disclaimers
- Wildfire: List Navigation
- Wildfire: Small Header, Large Body Lists
- A Top-Five U.S. Bank: Large Header, Small Body Lists
- The “Race Condition”
- FedEx: Scaffolding Prompts
- Amtrak: Implicit Confirmation and the “ellipses/and” Question Form
- AirTran: Reducing the Information Burden
- Guessing Right
- Semantics: When “Problem” Was a Problem
- Where We've Been—Where We Must Go
- Postscript
- Suggested Reading List
- Glossary
-
Case Studies
Product information
- Title: Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice, The
- Author(s):
- Release date: January 2003
- Publisher(s): Addison-Wesley Professional
- ISBN: 0321154924
You might also like
book
Building Cognitive Applications with IBM Watson Services: Volume 6 Speech to Text and Text to Speech
Abstract The Building Cognitive Applications with IBM Watson Services series is a seven-volume collection that introduces …
book
Techniques for Noise Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are finding increasing use in everyday life. Many of the commonplace …
book
Robust Automatic Speech Recognition
Robust Automatic Speech Recognition: A Bridge to Practical Applications establishes a solid foundation for automatic speech …
book
Sheet Pan Science
Sheet Pan Science features 25 awesome, bubbling, colorful, fizzing, oozing science experiments that all fit on …