New Year, New Design

The speech technology industry is becoming more sophisticated—thanks to increased customer demands, more mature products, and enhanced use of these products. Because of this market maturity, our readers are demanding more. A recent survey concluded that our subscribers want more objective coverage of news, trends, and analysis; more in-depth features; more technical articles; more product highlights; and more implementation best practices. So we needed to make some changes in the pages of Speech Technology magazine and to its associated products.

The most obvious change is our redesign, thanks to our new Senior Designer Laura Hegyi, an award-winning designer with more than 25 years of design experience. As part of Laura's redesign efforts, she created some new departments to accommodate more of our readers' requests. To that end, this issue marks the first installment of "FYI," which provides news, trends, and analysis stories on some of the latest industry developments. The section's lead story, "Gartner Eyes IVR and EVP Vendors," by Associate Editor Coreen Bailor at CRM magazine, reveals some of the leading vendors in these markets. Also debuting in this month's issue is "Deployments," which features successful speech technology implementation stories. Read this department to see how the Federal Aviation Administration is using speech technology to train air traffic controllers and how St. Joseph Mercy Health System is benefiting from a VoIP implementation. In addition, premiering in this issue is "Speech Solutions," where we will regularly present a business problem and highlight some of the latest technologies aimed at solving it. This ensures that technology is covered based on its relevance to a business issue and not simply because it is new. 

In the spirit of giving more to our readers, we are also increasing our frequency from six issues per year to nine issues per year, starting with this issue. Additionally, we are generating fresh, original content for our Web site (www.speechtechmag.com) and our weekly email newsletter, Speech Technology eWeekly. To generate more print and online stories we needed to grow our editorial team. That's why we hired Senior Editor Leonard Klie to the Speech Technology staff. Leonard, who has more than 15 years of publishing experience, has already proven to be a tremendous asset to the team.

While we renamed some of our columns, we kept all of the magazine's existing columnists. To prevent them from keeling over at the thought of writing three more columns each year, we created an alternating columnist schedule. So if you don't see a familiar columnist's name in this issue, it will likely be in the next issue.

Feel free to email me your thoughts on the redesign, new departments, or anything else at dmyron@infotoday.com. 

David Myron
Editorial Director
dmyron@infotoday.com