OpenMethods Blog

The First Step is Admitting You Have A Problem

admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:17:27 +0000

You may have seen the recent editorial in SpeechTech magazine by Info Today’s David Myron entitled “Your Call Automation Sucks”. In it, Mr. Myron describes his wake-up call, or in this case, wake-up email of the same title, that led him to issue an open call for VUI help. Unconventional yes, but I think this is a bold move and more companies should follow his lead. Some out of the box thinking is exactly what we need in this industry to affect real change, as I’ve said before. Management of every company should call their self-service numbers and do some soul searching. In his case, Myron’s editorials are always as slick as Info Today’s website, but he had forgotten about his other public media channel – the IVR. This is a common problem by vendors who often think that just picking some internal IT guy to record a few prompts (that he probably wrote himself over the mic on his computer) is sufficient for customer self-service. Vendors ask for loyalty from their customers, but then treat them with such disregard in this respect. It took very little time or effort and no money for InfoToday to elicit a lot of free help. You get what you give – IVR karma.

–Simonie

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The Blame Game

admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:16:40 +0000

The Microsoft/TellMe Live Search 411 service has good data, that’s for sure. I tried a few obscure businesses and business types in small towns and it found them with no problem. Ultimately, as a user, if the data isn’t good or it is difficult to tell what data is available, that can make or break the service, regardless of speech technology. This was one of the problems with Dial Directions. The 411 voice is a little annoying, but I *really* do not like the following error: “I’m sorry, it’s not you, it’s me.” I know there is an ongoing debate about blaming the system or the caller, but I’m sort of against both. This is an extreme version of blaming the system and it doesn’t give the caller any idea why there was a problem or a way to correct it. Making matters worse, her whole intonation was different with that phrase - it sounded like someone died all of a sudden, compared to her annoyingly chipper voice previously. If the dialog is constructed well, there should be no blame at all. The caller shouldn’t feel as though they are the problem and they certainly shouldn’t feel lower confidence in the system. It’s not so much error correction as guiding the caller through branching paths based on bumps encountered, as in human-human conversation. As for the service, I also had trouble with barge-in, to the point that I wasn’t sure it was on. In general, the system talked a bit much, especially for repeat callers, but did provide good options and I like being able to share the info.

–Simonie

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Give it up for Hy-Vee

admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:15:48 +0000

I would like to give a shout out to an IVR I call several times a month with little or no difficulty – Hyvee Pharmacy in Liberty, MO. It’s a very basic DTMF system without any fancy bells or whistles, but it gets the job done every time and recognizes its own short-comings and makes a pharmacist available when necessary. No fuss, no muss. It just goes to show you that it doesn’t take much to make the customer happy. I’ve posted previously about taking the state of the art technology and design and making it available in systems today and how that would improve things, but it’s good to stop and realize that without much money or time, you can also provide good customer service that doesn’t add to the VUI backlash. Thanks, Hyvee.

–Simonie

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Is Humor the Killer App for Speech?

admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:14:42 +0000

The “duck quack is back”. I love this - http://blogs.angel.com/blog/?p=163. There doesn’t seem any hope of getting vendors to sign off on it though. This very design struck the VUI world several years ago: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3995/is_200110/ai_n8975793 and it didn’t catch on then either, even though NBD’s calls spiked from 5000 to 2 million per week. Regardless, I particularly love that this radio recording proves it’s not just an American phenomena to have bad IVRs or to loathe them. You can also download the duck quack as a ring tone, text DUCK to 51500.

As my friend and VUI colleague, Sarah Wayland says, “There are also “easter eggs”, e.g., if someone curses, we say “Would you talk to your mother like that?” or if the caller asks for some option not on the menu.” Maybe we just need to start surreptitiously sticking these things in, saying we’re just amusing ourselves and then accidentally let the vendor hear it and if they like it, we can quote these stats and maybe they’ll stay in. I’ve always liked this style, since MIT’s Galaxy system in the 90’s where they answered “42″ when someone asked “what is the meaning of life?”, which they actually did do quite often back then. This is the same idea behind a new trend in VUI design to acknowledge requests for “operator” or 0 presses by saying something along the lines of “I understand you would like to talk to an agent, but we need some answers first to ensure that interaction is successful.” One of the airlines (United?) has a great way of dealing with cursing. They say, “You sound frustrated. Let me get you an agent.” Catch all of this either by biometrics or keywords for cursing, etc, and offer that exact thing. I like this humorous but realistic response that I heard from Tom Houwing at SpeechTEK East 07 too:

System: “what’s your zipcode?”

Caller:

System: “WHAT was that?”

Caller:

System: “HELLO!?!? Anybody there!?!?”

I prefer recognizing what people are saying if we can and doing something with it, funny or not, rather than just ignoring it because they’re not options or simply bad language, but make people know we heard them.

–Simonie

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Dial Directions DIR ECT IONS

admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:12:08 +0000

Dial Directions (347-328-4667) is a free voice-activated service that provides

driving directions to all cell phone users. I recently reviewed this service

www.dialdirections.com and here is what I found:

What is everyone raving about here? I just called and had a horrible
experience. Yes the prompts are a little poor (too many explicit
confirmations, error messages repetitious, etc.), but I had an
extremely bad speech recog experience as well. It didn’t recognize me in
several circumstances and the error handling didn’t make it any
better. I like the idea, but this isn’t even ready for Beta.

Once I knew ahead of time the cities allowed and was able to access
the menu for address|intersection|business the first time, it went
*okay*. On my first call, it seemed after having several recognition
problems including not recognizing my “yes” for instructions twice,
the problems just got worse. Later it didn’t ask me beforehand if I
was going to say an address or not and it never recognized a street
name in the “address” section that it did in the second call
under “intersection”. Their ability to recognize in each area is not
uniform and therefore inconsistent and confusing to the user. I just
figured they didn’t have that street name covered yet when as it
turned out, they did. The error catching experience is unhelpful as
you can see.

I also don’t like that it hangs up immediately after finding
directions for you instead of giving you the option to find a second
location. There’s a problem with their content delivery too -
they should parse the map output better (a constant problem
since I myself started working on driving directions in the 90’s) and
when I asked for Taco Bell locations, I got several listed as 4 miles
away and the descriptions provided weren’t enough to distinguish
them, so they need better delivery there. Of course the dynamic
output is poor, from city names to street names, but they could do
some post processing on that.

–Simonie

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One Persona, Two Persona, Three Persona, Four

admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:09:00 +0000

As a consumer, lately I’ve come across more personas than ever before. Amtrak and Greyhound both greet callers with a friendly, “Hi, I’m so and so, your personal guide…” or some such thing and I can’t really say that I’ve had that trickle down to me on this end before. I’ve designed systems with personas in mind and heard discussions of other implementations in the past, but never had I actually felt the result until now. In both of these cases, the dialog itself was fairly natural and easy to use, but knowing the supposed name of my “automatic agent” wasn’t the reason why. It was inconsistent. At no other point in the dialog did the system personify and start talking to me like an entity who warrants a name, perhaps making small talk about the weather or bantering about how slow their computer is, like a live agent sometimes does. I’m not saying that’s preferable, in fact, haven’t we done the research at this point to refute claims that personas are even desirable? I’m just saying that if you’re going to give me your name, I have a different level of expectations for what may happen next. Maybe that’s the problem, efforts to make systems sound more and more human (however ultimately futile that effort is) set unrealistic expectations. Also, we know that a significant portion of the population is actually offended by the attempt to make systems sound “too” human, whether that is the intention or not. We’re not trying to fool anybody and apparently the public gets mad if it even smacks of us attempting to do just that, so let’s not.

–Simonie

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