Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice, The

Chapter Three. The Psychology of How People Interact with Speech-Recognition Systems

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation.

—ORSON WELLES

Imagine two speech-recognition systems created for identical applications. Both have been carefully designed. Both have been rigorously tested for quality and usability. Both have been fine-tuned over the course of progressively broader deployment. But—for some reason—one system is more successful than the other. More callers use it—and they use it more frequently. What could possibly be the difference? To understand why some systems work better than ...