CRM - January 2008 - (Page 36)

VUI DESIGN adapts the system to also accept account balance, balances, balance, account, and alimony. The problem with this idea, however, is simply statistical. The more items added to a grammar, the easier it is for recognition to go wrong, confusing a spoken word for some other homophonic option. Susan Hura, founder of SpeechUsability and a board member of the Applied Voice Input/Output Society (AVIOS), defines the programming of grammars as a balancing act between adding enough that the system recognizes common phrases, but not so much that recognition as a whole decreases. And, according to Melanie Polkosky, a human-factors psychologist specializing in VUI design, grammar creation begins to fail when the people at the helm become weary of errors. A successful VUI design, however, should have a good error-recovery system. Dave Pelland, director of the Intervoice Design Collaborative, cites an example in which two people with simJuan Gilbert, an associate professor in the computer science and software engineering department at Auburn University, where he teaches a class on VUI design, emphasizes the importance of this tuning cycle. “A grammar is a living thing,” he says. “You don’t design a grammar and then deploy it and then it’s done. Some unpredictable response might end up being common.” If a pattern of vocabulary-recognition errors emerges in which a segment of the population misinterprets a prompt and responds in an unrecognizable way, it’s time to hone the system. Sometimes that means simply adding more grammars. Robby Kilgore, creative director of professional services at Nuance Communications. “We all have the same toolbox of so many kinds of building blocks. How you use those and how you fit them together is the finesse-y part.” For instance, when asking for a phone number, an IVR might say either Please tell me your phone number, starting with the area code or Can I get your phone number, starting with the area code? The latter causes some VUI designers to bristle.What if, they ask, the end user simply says Yes? “But people don’t do that,” Kilgore argues. “There might be one person on the planet who will say Yes, you can, and nothing further. But 99.9 percent of the people will just tell you their phone number. There are certain things that are natural to the way people talk.” Of course, in cases that might elicit a broader response, it’s best to keep questions from being too open-ended. These types of questions facilitate a variety of unpredictable answers, disrupting the system’s comprehension and the serenity of the end user. Consequently, many designers include examples of possible responses. A prompt that has been successfully used at Intervoice goes as follows: IVR: XYZ Company. Para continuar en español, marque el numero ocho. In a few words, tell me what I can help you with today. You can say anything from “I want to pay my bill” to “My screen is black.” The first block of speech contains a brief greeting, followed by an opt-out for Spanish speakers. The next block emphasizes that the end user must use “a few words.” This is followed by examples worded in ways that make it clear they’re examples and not part of the menu proper. Modeling a proper response is particularly important, even for something as simple as a date of birth, for which end users might say June 15, 1984, or 6/15/1984 or 6/15/84. Even explaining how to say a birthday can be verbose: Tell me the name of the month, the date, then the year. To simplify, Hura suggests: Tell me the date, like June 15, 1984. Yet, unlike Intervoice’s prompt, Hura prefers to keep her model limited to one. www.destinationCRM.com COMMUNICATING IN A MARRIAGE That brings up the familiar issue of bloating a system. For grammars to function at their unambiguous best, they need to be closely linked with the prompts. Designers coming from software backgrounds tend to segregate the two, developing grammars independently, as if they The more items added to an IVR system, the easier it is for recognition to go wrong. ilar names are listed in the directory of the same company, making ambiguity inevitable. In such a case, a designer can add dialogue to the interactive voice response (IVR) system to distinguish between the two: End user: Call Tim Knight. IVR: Was that “Kim Knight”? End user: No. IVR: Then how about “Tim Knight”? End User: Yes. IVR: Dialing… Because IVRs don’t have a human set of comprehension skills, designers must find ways to limit what users say. By asking whether the desired contact is Kim Knight, the IVR system is already limiting the end user’s response. According to Pelland, before a speech application goes out, the designers collect utterances to see what sample callers might say during each point in the dialogue. Most grammars contain 10 to 20 phrases. 36 were strings of code. This is the wrong mentality, according to Gilbert. “Your prompt and your grammars have to be tightly coupled, like a husbandand-wife pair,” he says. “Think of them as a team, as a partnership.”And a good partnership between prompt and grammar constrains potential responses to a predictable handful—and those can be programmed into the system’s expectations. Anyone who has discovered lost pieces of their children’s Lego sets by stepping on them knows that the bricks consist of different shapes and sizes, some more painful than others. Each piece has a specific function. The part shaped like a wing, despite its astonishing efficiency at lacerating a foot, would be superfluous adorning a Lego car. Likewise, it’s important that the spoken components of a VUI come together in a certain way.“All conversations with VUIs are made out of building blocks, which you see over and over again,” says CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2008

CRM - January 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Facebook's About-Face On the Scene: Oracle OpenWorld 2007 CRM Market Set to Double Customers, Meet your Makers Required Reading Oh, Behave! Fine-Tuning the Channel Listen Up! The Master Piece Flying High on Customer Service Let's Get Digital The Big Rigs Get Revved Up Putting Asia in Your Pocket Secret of My Success Connect Re:Tooling Pint of View

CRM - January 2008

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