Conversations 2007

Day 3 and wrap-up notes

2007-10-29T14:42:00Z

Once again, a thank you for all who attended and interacted with us at Conversations. The event wouldn't have been the same without your participation. And what participation it was! "Traditionally" there has been some attrition in attendance on that Wednesday morning of the event, but this year all the Wednesday sessions appeared to be well attended. Thank you for everyone who stumbled out of bed to hear me talk about Automated Tech Support solutions at 8:30 in the morning! The format of the final...(read more)

A look at day 2...

2007-10-23T21:25:00Z

Well! Right now I can barely touch my hands together because my pecs hurt so much from the 5-person 120-lap marathon at Xtreme Indoor Karting . I had the fastest lap time on my team! (I also wiped out twice and pretty much doomed us to last place within the first few laps.) I heard rave reviews from several of the other Tuesday activities as well. A good time had by all, and more to come with our closing shindig coming up tonight. More gratifying than the fun at the arcade/karting place were many...(read more)

Off and running!

2007-10-22T19:32:00Z

We're off and running with a great conference. To steal from TV Guide, here's a quick list of Cheers and Jeers: Cheers for the industry forums -- all reports are that everyone who went really found these valuable. These sessions had very specific topics covered that were uniquely relevant to their industry. I ran the Utilities forum and it was a great, informal back-and-forth discussion between our two speakers and the others in the room. Jeers for our keynote speaker, unfortunately. Brought in to...(read more)

It's show time!

2007-10-21T14:47:00Z

Yup, here it is. Several months of planning come to a head starting this afternoon, as Conversations 2007 officially gets underway. If you're in the customer care or mobile industry and you're not attending, then you don't know what you're missing! But to possibly help you out, I will be here writing bits and pieces about the event and the content as it's presented. I'll also give a few sneak previews for folks in attendance who still want to check out the blog in real time as the conference unfolds....(read more)

So, you think this blogging thing will pan out?

2007-10-10T00:50:00Z

Much has been made about the emergence of social technologies, it's easy to shrug it off and say yeah, yeah, sure, and I bet North Korea will actually disable its nuclear facilities. And yet, I think we're all waking up to the power of these social networks and shared soapboxes. It's amazing how the Web is becoming a cross between a democracy and a meritocracy. If you make positive contributions, you will be recognized for it -- from Amazon to eBay, whether it be karma points, 4 out of 5 stars, or any point-based moderation system....(read more)

More mature, less awkward teen, and zero used car sales

2007-10-01T14:47:00Z

I just finished editing all of the Care abstracts going into this year's Conversations program. I'm quite pleased with the lineup that we've scheduled -- everything from in-depth technical sessions on robust parsing and SpeakFreely deployments to higher level discussions of how to develop a speech strategy. I only wish I could be in all 32+ sessions at once, because I know I have a lot to glean from all of these! One thing that I have noticed is that the way we talk about speech recognition in general...(read more)

But what does it actually do?

2007-09-24T13:30:00Z

A few years ago, Nuance (then ScanSoft) was very clearly a technology-focused company. Mind you, that's a very loaded statement that comes with some implicit baggage. What sort of judgment does one make when reading that? Let me put it in this perspective -- the way we approached customers in the sales cycle was very clearly along the lines of, "You need speech. Hey! We have speech. We got lots of speech. Whaddya want, you need speech recognition? Text-to-speech? Speaker verification? We got TONS...(read more)

Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future

2007-09-17T18:41:00Z

Oh, that Niels Bohr. What a kidder. Who knew that a Danish quantum physicist could be so funny. He's the source of today's title, which serves as a great introduction for our announcement of this year's keynote speaker....(read more)

(I Can't Get No) Customer Satisfaction

2007-09-10T20:34:00Z

When we were kicking around ideas for this year's theme, the concept of "Satisfaction" came up time and time again. Customer Satisfaction, a.k.a. CSAT, is certainly more than a buzzword. Most contact centers pay at least lip service to CSAT. Many others actively track it with customer surveys and use it to judge the effectiveness of their service. Many self-service replacements or upgrades these days are not motivated by a desire to increase automation rates (or "containment" or "deflection"... you know, how can we stop the customer from talking to us?). Rather, they are motivated by a reprioritized emphasis on customer satisfaction (or "first call resolution"... you know, did we actually help people?)...(read more)

I'm too executive for my shirt

2007-08-28T00:48:00Z

When we first started coming up with ideas for session topics for this year's Conversations, an interesting possibility began to emerge. The possibility of an executive track at Conversations. So, would an executive track be well attended? Would enough attendees, in fact, be too executive for their shirts? So executive it hurts?...(read more)

Speech Mythbusters webinar

2007-08-27T13:02:00Z

For those of you who have been following this blog, or speech recognition in general, you may be interested in attending a web presentation that I'm giving on Tuesday at 11am PDT/2pm CDT, sponsored by the good folks at ICMI and Customer Management Insight. The webinar is called, "Speech Mythbusters: Debunking 10 Common Myths about Voice Automation" and it's free to attend. ...(read more)

iKnew something was missing... and iFound proof

2007-08-21T14:10:00Z

It's always nice to receive validation that you're not just blowing smoke up people's... ahem, noses... A recent poll showed that there's some truth to my previous blog post about the iPhone lacking speech recognition....(read more)

It's the Technology, Stupid

2007-08-20T15:05:00Z

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. So I'm here to say that we haven't forgotten that "It's the Technology, Stupid"... that some people do care about Nuance's speech technology as much as Nuance's solutions....(read more)

Not Your Last Resort

2007-08-03T16:46:00Z

Okay, okay, let's tackle this one. You're telling your boss that you'd like to attend Conversations... and your boss takes one look at the site and says, wait, you're going away for three days to spend time at a resort in Florida? Tell your boss: damn straight!...(read more)

What's Next for a Conversations theme

2007-07-23T12:30:00Z

Did you catch the double entendre in the subject? To tell you what's next for our Conversations planning, I must tell you that "What's Next" is the end result of our planning committee's work on choosing a theme for the event....(read more)