Interesting how the world around us can teach us many design lessons. In particular, I spent some time with my family in the California area, where I had a chance to experience design without intent. This happened at a sea-themed park where after watching some shows and enjoying some rides I started noticing the overwhelming [...]
I was recently listening to a talk by Simon Sinek about how great leaders inspire everyone to take action. His premise is pretty simple yet very powerful, and can be better understood by looking at his “Golder Circle” and its three layers: The core “why” (the cause), the middle “how” (the value proposition) and the [...]
I was recently asked about the presence of humor in IVR applications. To be honest with you, I haven’t ran across too many of those, other than the one implemented at Travelocity. One of their menu choices is to hear a gnome joke. On top of it, they allowed user participation by inviting people to [...]
I normally get my fair share of laughs (and tears) from listening to user call recordings and their experiences while using automated systems. But a friend of mine just sent me one from a user interacting with a call center agent. We all know that the use of jargon and technical terminology can cause confusion [...]
Error recovery strategies and the verbiage around them has always been a hot topic of debate. We’ve all heard the classical “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you.” and “I’m sorry I didn’t understand you.” messages that are normally implemented as global prefixes to further attempts to help users get back on track. Some other designers [...]
As you know, I enjoy looking at other fields that might have design elements that could be leveraged in a speech and multimodal world. My latest discovery was the film “Objectified” by Gary Hustwit. Even though the documentary is centered around the topic of Industrial Design and the process by which well known products are [...]
Oh yeah, it’s that time of the year again. If you’re planning to attend this year’s SpeechTEK in New York, please stop by and say hi. Also, you can now look at the final version of the program. In particular, I would like to invite you to the following sessions: Introduction to Voice User Interface [...]
Someone recently brought to my attention the fantastic keynote presentation by Bill Buxton (the author of Sketching User Experiences) from this year’s Mix 09 event. The concepts and ideas mentioned by Bill — particularly the notion of ROE or Return On Experience — resonated so much with me, that I think his vision should help [...]
Very interesting debate was triggered by the recent tests (Part 1 and Part 2) on Google Voice performed by readers of the Gadgetwise blog. The overall premise was for readers to call the article?s writer phone number and leave a creative voicemail to gauge the effectiveness of Google?s voicemail transcription system. Even though at first [...]
Outbound calling (meaning automated phone calls that go out to specific individuals) is a very profitable business that thrives at times such as this one when companies need to reach more consumers yet want to reduce the costs of making those calls since most of the time they are nothing more than the equivalent of [...]
