Speech Technology - October 2008 - (Page 19)

COVER STORY Companies to Call Sponsored Content 55 percent of the time, which is just slightly a bit better than guesswork,” Larson says. The work has been thwarted by many factors, starting with the challenges found in building a common emotive speech frame of reference. The work has also encountered problems due to the ephemeral nature of these concepts, which denies easy description and, therefore, prevents robust definitions of related terms. Furthermore, despite the largely cross-cultural nature of emotion, language translation problems add another facet to the problem. Solving the problem means developing a common reference framework, one that could add structure and definition to a topic that to date has generated incomplete (some would add largely subjective) data. Once the framework is developed, vendors will need to develop algorithms so their systems convey the proper emotions. The algorithms will then need to be tested to determine how well they work. Vendors will need to find out which expressive phrases are truly useful in real applications for each language and record them with the right degree of emotion to match their expressive intents while avoiding an unnatural gap in the synthetic voice baseline. Since there are many gradations of happiness, companies will need to present the right one at the right time to customers. An Indirect Path Consequently, the line from these emotive speech objectives to their eventual end point is crooked, not straight; it will entail a lot more research, experimentation, and usability testing. Therefore, suppliers need to be willing to invest in projects that may go nowhere for a while. “History has shown that all new technologies are misused before they find their niche,” Larson says. Certain vendors are taking portions of their research and development budgets and allocating them to solving the problems. In addition, such initiatives have spread out from vendor labs into standards organizations. The World Wide Web Consortium, for example, has assigned a working group to study the issue of adding emotional components to voice systems. Yet one important question has remained largely unanswered: “While a company could make a PC sound surprised, is that something that it really should do?” Avaya’s Matula asks. In other words, how will users react to emotive voice systems? Quite frankly, no one really knows—at least not right now. Because of that uncertainty, not everyone is jumping on the emotive speech bandwagon. Some suppliers and customers are willing to let others be the industry’s guinea pigs. In addition, certain vendors are finding it difficult to build a business case for tackling the vexing questions, and some have moved the work to the back burner. “Adding expressive speaking to our products is not a high priority for us right now,” Nuance’s Faulkner admits. The expressive speech work is relatively new and a great deal more research and testing are needed. There is no guarantee that the tests will provide the desired results. Given that, Nuance is concentrating on features that are simpler to understand and offer a quicker payback, such as improving usability and aligning these systems more closely with a company’s business rules. Others think a payback from adding emotions to speech systems is self-evident. “By incorporating emotive speech into voice systems, human-machine interactions may become more appealing, more natural, and more effective because users will find it easier to interact with a well-mannered machine,” Loquendo’s Pautasso concludes. The more well-mannered a machine is, the less likely it is that the user will opt out to talk with an agent. Time will tell which position is correct. Estimates range from a couple to a handful of years to forever before the speech synthesis industry addresses all the emotive speech challenges. So for now, users will have to interact with machines that apologize but do not really sound like they mean it. MTI is experienced at every level in developing and hosting affordable IVR solutions MTI has lived and breathed IVR hosting for more than 17 years. With MTI you have choices. We can develop and host applications or you can develop your own application and host it in our environment. MTI also partners with leading developers to deliver innovative, cost-effective, reliable IVR applications with maximum customer satisfaction. You will experience the benefit of customized IVR solutions at “off-the-shelf” application pricing. • Carrier grade reliability and support • Contracted service levels 99.9+% • 24/7 technical support • Genesys VoiceXML 2.1 certified voice gateways • Nuance automated speech recognition (ASR) and text to speech (TTS) • Accept circuits from any telecom provider or carrier • Direct VoIP/SIP support • Back-end integration through Web Services and/or VPN • Secured facility • Redundant, geographically diverse operations You deserve intelligent hosted IVR solutions and MTI delivers. Message Technologies, Inc. 1995 North Park Place Meridian – 5th Floor Atlanta, GA 30339 1-800-868-3684 www.messagetech.com www.speechtechmag.com http://www.messagetech.com http://www.messagetech.com http://www.speechtechmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Speech Technology - October 2008

Speech Technology - October 2008 Contents Editor’s Letter Industry View Inside Outsourcing Interact Keynoter Highlights the Shrinking Technological World Former Hacker Tackles IVR and Biometrics ‘Press 1’ for Caller Thoughts Soundbytes Voice Vote A New Dragon Emerges Overheard/Underheard An Emotional Mess Emotional Intelligence The Case for Call Recording Unified in Care and Communications An Education in E-Learning Guest Column Standards Speech Solutions Voice Value Forward Thinking

Speech Technology - October 2008

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