Conversations 2007

It's the Technology, Stupid

Hello all -- hope you didn't miss me too much during my brief summer vacation.  Those of you outside of American politics in the 90's may not recognize the idiom from this blog's title, but sometimes I think it holds true for this year's Conversations conference.  We marketers tend to wax eloquently about the benefits of our "solutions," instead of the features of our products.  Hey, that's important.  As I've mentioned before, customers don't want to buy the 3/4" drill bit, they just want a 3/4" hole.  The worst product demos are the ones that spend time going into all sorts of bizarre menu options to show you more new features that you won't use.  The biggest failing of most hi-tech companies is to spend too much time talking about how great their products are. 

Okay, that's all very well and good... but it's important not to forget that some people *DO* care about the drill bit.  Maybe they really want to make sure that the hole conforms to their specifications.  Maybe they've got pressure from higher-ups to justify their plan for making that hole.  Or you know what?  Maybe they think drill bits are pretty cool and want to learn more about them.  The "benefit" for these customers is knowing more about the features.  Put another way, while some people think that SISR is what you use to cut PAPR, others need to know that we support the 2.2.3 GARBAGE special rule introduced in the W3C's first version of the Speech Recognition Grammar Specifications (SRGS).  (Answer: Yes we do, with Nuance Recognizer v9.)

So I'm here to say that we haven't forgotten that "It's the Technology, Stupid."  Despite all the advancements Nuance as a company has made in the areas of performance measurement, improving the caller experience, up-leveling the role of contact centers, and a solutions-based approach to problem-solving for our customers.... at its heart, Conversations is still about cool speech technology.  And Nuance has a whole lot of it!  So let me reassure all of you drill-bit-collectors out there, we still have a healthy dose of technology sessions in the Technology Foundations track.  There's a session on our roadmap for speech developer tools.  Another on migrating to Nuance Recognizer v9.  Some case studies about successful application of technologies such as SpeakFreely.  A session on refining your application by using a Champion-Challenger architecture. 

I'm looking forward to revealing the full agenda in the next few weeks as we finalize content and confirm speakers.  I think you'll like what you see!

Published Monday, August 20, 2007 2:05 PM POST BY: Jeff Foley