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Stephen Potter tells a funny story about a person shouting at a speech recognition system, and why that generally doesn’t help with recognition issues.  For the people reading this who are not in the business, I’ll explain a bit.

When you encounter a telephone speech recognition system and it doesn’t understand you, there is a good chance that what you said was recorded and saved in a database.  Reports are generated that (if looked at) will tell the designer where people seem to be having problems, and then the designer can go back and listen to individual recordings of people actually trying and failing to be understood.  Often we hear the person coughing, or talking to the dog or something like that.  Sometimes they just misunderstood the prompt and said something that we weren’t expecting, and that can be a help in improving the prompt or changing the system to recognize what was actually said.

When I started in this business, everything was touch-tone, but you could still get clues about the application by "service observing the call".  People often talked to the touch-tone systems but by that point they usually were not being very nice.  I DO NOT WANT TO PRESS STAR TO HEAR THE MENU AGAIN, I WANT TO TALK TO A #@!@ PERSON YOU STUPID MACHINE! was a pretty common phrase.

When speech recognition capabilities first appeared commercially, their recognition ability was limited to recognizing the numbers zero through nine and the words yes, no, and oh.  A few years later we had the ability to build very limited vocabularies ourselves of words like Sales, Service and Operator.  We soon learned to include synonyms for words like Operator, so that if a person said agent or human we could still understand them and transfer them to a person.

I believe there was a market for a vocabulary of all the words and phrases that a person might say when they are frustrated with talking to a machine, but sadly we never built that product.  So to paraphrase Stephen, yelling and cursing at the machine may make you feel better but it won’t help get you to a person any faster.

We’ve had a speech recognition auto-attendant at Gold Systems for about five years I guess.  While you can still call people directly and you can even talk to a very nice person if you prefer, a lot of people use our V-Dialer to reach us.  Most of us have put the phone number in our email signatures, so my signature says something like Call V-Dialer and say "Terry Gold." 

Yesterday I was walking by the area where FedEx drops off packages, and since I’m always on the lookout for new gadgets showing up, I was particularly interested in a server-size box.  The label made me laugh out loud, because the package was addressed to "Say Jerry Loui"  I guess a human somewhere had a recognition problem.  I’ll be curious to see if Jerry now starts getting junk mail addressed to "Say Jerry Loui".

Marshall Harrison, one of the guys behind gotspeech.net commented on my Good Speech – Bad Speech post last night.  In my post I described a particularly ugly prompt I’d seen in a speech recognition application and called on people to write better applications that keep the customer’s needs in mind at all times.

Marshall has a similar soapbox as mine and one day we’re going to drag them down to the Pearl Street Mall and preach together about the need to create applications that are easier to use and that, (dare I say it) People Will Love.  Marshall points out (correctly) that bad application design is often not the developer’s fault.  The reason I’m doing a whole post on a comment is that a light bulb just went on for me.  The design of speech recognition telephony applications is often widely separated from the development of the application. 

By the time the developer is assigned to a project, the user interface design has often been fought over for months by people who don’t have user interface design experience.  They know what they want (usually) but then they make the mistake of drawing out the design on the whiteboard, a napkin or in Visio.  Visio is the worst, because it makes the design look official and unchangeable.  People who wouldn’t think of trying to tell you how to design a complex database application or desktop user interface, feel very comfortable specifying the voice user interface for you for some reason.

So what do we do?

• I think that regardless of what role you play in speech application development, you have to realize that you are signing your name and staking your reputation on how well the application ultimately works.  If you see bad design, speak up and propose a a better alternative.
• Try to get invited to the party earlier in the process.  What starts out as "we need to figure out what we want before we get the developers involved" doesn’t work here so well.  The sooner we get involved the better the application will be.  Yes, it means you may have to attend some business meetings, but trust me, learning about business can be good for a techie’s career.
• Find some good examples that can be backed up with concrete numbers to help make your case for good design.  Business people respond to hard numbers about saving money and improving customer satisfaction.  We built an application a few years ago for a customer who had a goal of automating 10% of the calls.  The application ended up automating 51% of the calls and customer satisfaction and CSR satisfaction actually improved.  Do you think the people funding the project listened a little closer to our silly design recommendations once they realized the impact they were having?  You bet they did!

To sum it up, we’re all responsible for good design, and if we can do a better job of it this industry will grow even faster.