AVIxD Workshop 2010

Speech in a Multi-Channel World

Sunday, 1 August 2010

Thanks to all who participated.  We had another excellent workshop, and are hard at work producing the papers.  We hope to publish the papers here some time in November.  Here is the original call for papers.

Call for Papers Join us for the 2010 workshop in voice user interface design, Speech In a Multi-Channel World. The AVIxD workshop is a hands-on session in which voice user interface practitioners come together to debate a topic of interest to the VUI community. The workshop is an opportunity to meet with your peers and delve deeply into a single topic. As in 2009, we will be publishing our papers here on the website. To be considered for the workshop, individuals must submit a position paper of approximately 500 words on this year’s topic: Speech as a stand-alone application, living in its own silo, is coming to an end. As speech becomes more integrated with backend systems, other modalities are emerging as new opportunities to manage customer interactions. SMS, MMS, smartphone applications, live chat, “bot” chat, social media, instant messaging and other nascent media are gaining traction not only as stand-alone opportunities for new customer touch-points, but are becoming more integrated with each other. The market is demanding a new class of tools and development methodology where speech is only one element of an integrated, multi-channel or multi-modal solution. Many traditional speech customers have also chosen to begin making it easier for their customers to reach live agents. These three changes in the market directly threaten stand-alone speech IVRs: Customers are using channels other than speech as their preferred point of contact. Customers expect all channels to be aware of each other. Customers will fight an IVR to get to a live agent. How must speech evolve to survive these changes? Since the speech medium is so much different from the visual, how can we help frame the conversation to prevent speech from receding into an ugly shadow of its former self, but rather make it a dynamic, useful medium as part of an integrated whole?

Peter Krogh (peter@speechcycle.com)

David Attwater (david@eiginc.com)