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
