Speech Technology Magazine Blog » Larson’s Picks for SpeechTEK Europe

Larson’s Picks for SpeechTEK Europe Len Klie   —   March 10, 2011 @ 12:44 pm

SpeechTEK Europe’s conference chair, Jim Larson, recently gave show organizers his own personal program picks for the London conference May 24-26. Here’s what he had to say:

Is IVR becoming obsolete as always-connected smartphones become ubiquitous? Is speech-only interaction being superceded by multimodal touch-text-talk user interfaces? I’m looking forward to three presentations that will shed light on these questions: The first is the session titled Customer Interaction: Anywhere, Anytime, Any Device, during which Roberto Pieraccini from SpeechCycle, Raj Tumuluri from Openstream, and Dave Martin from Avaya will address how to achieve customer interaction and explore the technical challenges that must first be overcome. In the SpeechTEK University Workshop Adding Speech to Your Own Android Application, Diego Zanin of Loquendo will describe how to make a speech-enabled application that is ready for any Android user. And, of course, there’s the Wednesday keynote presentation by Dave Burke from Google discussing cloud-based speech recognition services and applications for the Android and Chrome platforms.

Customers can now interact with an organization face-to-face, by voice, email, and social media. Users will choose their preferred modes and will switch seamlessly between modes to obtain information and perform tasks. The session on Multichannel Strategies, moderated by Nava Shaked and featuring David Lopes from Convergys and Daniel Hendling from Deutsche Telekom, will address how to create consistent personal interaction across multiple channels.

Of special interest to Europeans is bridging the language divide, and this is the subject of the Thursday keynote presentation by Professor Alexander Waibel. Learn about the current state of the art in cross-lingual computer communications in the session on Multilingual Applications, which describes how to design and deploy applications that speak and listen in more than one language.

I’m also looking forward to other sessions on testing natural language dialogues, getting to grips with speech application development languages, voice biometrics, designing voice user interfaces, and more.

via speechtechblog.com