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

The Importance of Multi-Phase Deployment

Before we discuss the benefits of deploying in multiple phases, let's examine the pitfalls of not deploying in phases.

Let's say we're operating a large call center. In anticipation of launching our new speech-recognition system, we've rerouted our phone lines, and trained and reassigned thousands of agents to handle other tasks. The big day comes, we throw the metaphorical switch, and—ta-dah!—our system is fully deployed.

But there's a problem. Perhaps the system can't handle the call volume for technical reasons. Or maybe we start getting hundreds of calls from frustrated or angry callers who were given the wrong information by the system or who stumble over a particular question (that was never encountered ...