Google’s Duplex Lets a Bot Be Your Voice

Thanks to the Duplex technology, Google Assistant can make simple calls on your behalf. But how much automation is too much?

Successful Failures

Speech has to step up or risk becoming 2011's Symbian.

Thinking Backward and Thinking Ahead

Sci-fi paves the way for further TTS exploration

The Creepiness Factor

Too much personalization in your IVR can lead to trouble.

Voice Biometrics Grows to Meet Global Challenges

Today's solutions are more accurate and easier to use and implement.

Speech-Enabled Mobile Search Marches On

Free services expand as technology moves out of the niche.

Apple's Ironic Product Positioning

Saying Hello to the new iPhone will go unanswered

Coping with the Terrible 2000s: CAT's Prospects in 2006

We are now half way through the first decade of the new millennium. It's time to take stock of the factors that have had the greatest influence on automated speech's progress into enterprise and service provider IT infrastructures as a major component of Conversational Access Technologies (CAT).

Speech Automation's False Choices

As a growing number of enterprises make their conversion to VoIP (Voice over IP) or IP telephony, the notion of automated speech is getting short shrift.

Spread the Word

If the combination of SpeechTEK, TVUI and SAXPO has any common denominator, it is this: We have made great strides in educating ourselves about the power of standards and the Internet in making 'insanely great' self-service, telephone-based applications.

2005: Yet Another Year of Intelligent Migration

OPUS Research is a long-standing and unrepentant booster of speech-enablement. We stand for judicious use of advanced speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech conversion (TTS) and all the attendant hardware, software, professional services and tooling (soaking up something on the order of $28 billion in 2005) directed at a single goal. That is to take existing self-service infrastructure - on a Web site, in front of a corporate directory 'auto-attendant,' baked into a contact center or hosted.

CAN U W8 for Multimodal: SMS and Clunky Heuristics

We all take the browser on our computer for granted. As I write this, my co-worker is watching the new (scary, animated, dark) Eminem video on her IE with a QuickTime helper. Lately, I've been looking at another form of browser, not really designed as a browser, indeed, not even capable of interpreting markup language: SMS. That stands for Short Message Service and is the ubiquitous text.

Speech Business: Open Season

The most recent SpeechTEK in New York turned out to be a wake-up call for redefining what we mean by 'open' in the IVR and speech world.

Revisiting the ROI of Speech

Back in June 2002, while I was a senior vice president with The Kelsey Group, we conducted a research study on "The ROI of Speech." A select group of relatively large companies, primarily in the financial services and catalogue sales sectors provided some impressive numbers that have been baked into countless presentations delivered by the peripatetic SpeechWorks/Nuance sales force. …

From (Political) Show Business to 'Go' Business

The voice automation industry in the US can be generally situated in a pretty wide cross-section of political landscapes: you've got the Dallas metroplex (Bush country), California (Schwarzenegger's domain), and the Northeast Corridor (Virginia through DC up to liberal New York and Massachusetts).

Pre-packaged or Redundant? Reinventing the App.

As we reflect on AVIOS/SpeechTEK, the second major show of the year, the pre-packaged apps mantra that was sounded at TVUI continued to resonate on the floors of the exhibition floor in San Francisco.

Speech: It's Not Different, Stupid

With Bill Gates as a headliner at a speech show, the question naturally arises as to whether speech technology will become more widely available, riding Microsoft's low-price/high-volume software model.

Optimizing Your Life(cycle)

Zelos Group recently completed a detailed life-cycle analysis of a typical speech deployment, based on a real-world experience base of 20 deployments for both premises-based and hosted solutions.

Attitude Correction: Deconstructing Six Myths About TTS

Ever want to stop and say, hey, let's give the kid some respect? That's how I feel about TTS. Here's my contribution to giving the technology its due.

Factors of 10, or, Is This Trip Necessary?

As some of you are acutely aware, autumn involves large checks going to tuition (at all levels these days). Which brings me immediately to my first factor of 10: I'm pretty sure that when I went to college it was 1/10th of what I'm paying for Vassar this fall.