In January I said that Speech Recognition was in the trough of disillusionment. I predict that by mid next year though, we’ll be viewing the technology very differently. Moore’s Law and clever programming are advancing the science of speech recognition very quickly I believe. People are going to be surprised at how fast this technology is going to improve.
However – no amount of technology will make up for bad application design. I saw what may be the ugliest prompt ever a few weeks ago. "Press or say eleven . . ." I assume there were ten other choices before this prompt and I’m not positive that this was the last prompt.
Please people – I know it is fun to create these applications, but take some time to think about the poor user. They don’t want more choices, they just want to get the information they need and then get off of the phone as quickly as possible. And for goodness sake, give them the option to speak to a person if they can’t figure out how to get what they need from your application. They’re going to find a way out eventually and there is no point in making them mad as they try to figure out the secret back door.
I’ve been on this soapbox before, but I’m not putting it away until the customer is treated like the important person they are instead of like some rat to be herded through a maze.