Cory blogged last month about Citibank's ad campaign for their new Simplicity credit card, which pushes the ability to press zero to speak directly with an agent. Last night, I caught their two TV ads while watching Dancing with the Stars (which, incidentally is the best reality show ever, and the most delightful piece of dance world camp since Strictly Ballroom).

Both ads parody the difficulties of navigating a frustrating IVR, the first one "Steak" showing a man going through a touchtone menu as his dinner preparations burst into flames, and the second one "Train" another man talking to a speech-enabled IVR as his one-sided conversation draws increasingly negative reactions from nearby passengers.

Of course, the commercials are parodies, and unfair in their details to actual IVRs. But besides being an expression of popular discontent with the IVR that companies ignore at their peril, the second spot raises some interesting issues around speech.

Continue reading "A New Way to Opt Out of the IVR" »

Posted by Amy at 04:15 PM | Permalink

I'm back in the office after the SpeechTEK West conference in San Francisco. It was a great conference - I ate some delicious seafood, drank some yummy wines, and had a lot of interesting conversations about the directions the IVR industry is moving.

For those of you unfamiliar with the event, SpeechTEK offers a variety of sessions and workshops aimed at both business and technical users involved in using speech recognition technology, plus an expo hall for vendors, and several receptions that allow you to catch up with everyone you haven't seen since the last SpeechTEK event. My role at the conference was to man the Audium booth in the exhibit hall, where we were demoing our latest software release, Audium Studio 5.

I've posted some pictures from the event in the extended entry section:

Continue reading "SpeechTEK West 2006" »

Posted by Amy at 02:57 PM | Permalink