My talk provides a practical, step-by-step overview of the issues surrounding spoken user interfaces. Concentrating on telephony call center applications with natural spoken language interfaces, I will cover the entire application lifecycle: design and prototyping, coding, back-end and platform integration, deployment, tuning and testing.

I will detail the process we use at SpeechWorks, beginning with customer-centered user-interface design and prototyping, which leads to a detailed specification. I will then discuss the issues involved in coding the specification on a development environment, of which we use several telephony specific platforms and plain old C++ code. I will then focus on how interfaces are ramped up during deployment, during which time tuning and testing is fairly intense.

I will conclude with an overview of some of the future directions in spoken user interfaces, focusing flexibility and naturalness.
I will cosnider the design of a dialogue system to accomodate various kind of user profiles, from naive first-time users to sophisticated repeat visitors. Another issue I will bring up is whether we should be building systems that are as human-like as possible, or whether we should be considering alternative design strategies. I will also briefly discuss plans underway through the W3C, the VoiceXML alliance, and proprietary solutions already available that deliver a WWW-like interface through a speech-only interface.

Throughout, I will support the discussion with case studies, try to show you how we actually do things at SpeechWorks, and I will provide demos of some of our deployed systems. If you'd like to try one of systems on your own time before or after the talk, I would suggest:

• United Airline Flight Info: 1.800.241.6522
  a. choose option 1 from initial menu to get our
  spoken flight info; it's all United offers now
  b. try to get info on a flight; you might try to
  get one arriving into San Francisco from New York's
  John F Kennedy (JFK) airport at around 3 PM. Try
  to see what happens if you mumble, or say the wrong
  time or airport.

Several of our Voice Portal Applications (Bell South in Atlanta, Audiopoint in D.C., Foodline in New York, and stock quotes in Singapore) are described, with their live phone numbers, at:
http://www.speechworks.com/news/release_detail.cfm?id=A29E4B4C-FF48-11D3-95870050041E4B20