Improving Customer Service with Speech Technology

In an article appearing today on the Communication Convergence site, Brian Garr of IBM Pervasive Computing provides some insightful recommendations to enterprises looking to use speech technology to improve customer service:

• Don't rebuild when you can extend.


• Plan to scale the business; don't paint yourself into a corner by locking into a proprietary system.


• Use open standards.


• Unify your customer experience across all horizontal touch points.


• Recognize the value of conversational access and Natural Language Understanding technologies.

Its actually an interesting exercise to constrast the W3C's VoiceXML to Microsoft's SALT in the context of these recommendations.

First, in order extend something it has to exist. A survey conducted earlier this year by the VoiceXML Forum, indicates very little activity in terms of deployed SALT applications, and significant numbers of deployed VoiceXML apps. Before you dismiss this as merely the VoiceXML Forum's slant, its been shown elsewhere that a large proportion of Microsoft's SALT initiative are active members of the VoiceXML community.

While SALT has been submitted to the W3C for consideration, it is not officially a standard (any company with W3C membership can propose anything it wants). VoiceXML 2.0 emerged this year as an official W3C recommendation (i.e. a standard in W3C vernacular). Neverthless, one could argue that SALT is not proprietary, in that the specification has been published, and there is a vehicle in place (i.e. SALT Forum)for nurturing the technology. Besides the fact that this vehicle has apparently ran out of gas over a year ago, the crux of the matter is that SALT is based on a few simple constructs and non-trivial application development will require substantial tooling. It is clear where these tools are coming from. Not only are the tools proprietary, but they are also only supported on the tool vendor's proprietary platform.