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Snow Day
March 29, 2011
Storms have hit all over the country and literally pounded the Northeast this winter. Some of the culprits? The usual suspects (according to the Weather Channel)…
Ice storms. Ice storms are freezing rain of a least a quarter inch or more. Freezing rain is rain that turns to ice when it hits freezing temperatures on the ground or things close to the ground (your car).
Sleet. Sleet is…the definition of sleet is a little confused. It can be snow that melts as it falls or small pellets of hail (small, not the golf ball-sized chunks that chip your car windshield). Or, if you live in Canada, sleet doesn’t grace your meteorological vocabulary—you say wintery mix.
Lake effect. If you live in the Great Lakes region, you know all about lake effect. Cold air moves over a warmer lake, clouds gather and snow starts falling.
Nor’easters. Some of the nastiest of winter’s storms, they’re boosted by strong northeasterly winds from off the Atlantic. They come with heavy rain or snow and huge tides and hurricane-force winds that wreak havoc along the coast. Fun.
Blizzards. (Let’s hope not.) Blizzards are powerful storms that usually form when the jet stream heads south with cold air and smacks into the warm air there. They usually have cold temperatures (below 20 degrees Fahrenheit) and strong winds (35 mph or more). Severe blizzards dip below 10 degrees and throw in 45 mph-plus winds, just for trips and giggles.
Whether you live in the southern part of the country with ice storms or around the Great Lakes with lake effect storms or in the Northeast with the North Atlantic wind blowing in your face, winter can be a trial. No one wants to go out in that weather. But we have to. There’s work and school to consider.
Or is there? If you’re a company and want to give your employees a break, set up an IVR system to let them know you closed the office. If you’re a school, use IVR technology to let students and parents know you canceled classes (snow day!). Save everybody a trip.
Right now, a huge storm is moving in over the Plains and Great Lakes. It’s supposed to keep going to the Northeast. Well, maybe the kids are happy about it, at least. Bundle up, folks.
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“HAL, what’s on the news...
March 29, 2011
“Where were you when Germany surrendered?”
“Where were you when they shot Kennedy?”
“Where were you on 9/11?”
It was one of those days.
“Where were you when the space shuttle blew up?”
It’s kind of hard to imagine, but it’s now 25 years to the day since the space shuttle Challenger disaster—January 28, 1986. A quarter century.
One thing that’s interesting is how we learned about the disaster. If you were in school, your teacher stopped the class and wheeled in a TV to put on the news. If you were working, you gathered around a TV with your coworkers.
That was the mid-eighties—we all watched it on a color TV somewhere. In the sixties when Kennedy died, a lot of people watched it on black and white TVs. In 1945, most people heard about the end of World War II on staticky radios.
When you think about it, there’s a big difference between listening to a radio and watching a black and white TV. It’s not as big of a difference going from black and white to color. But from color TVs to what we have today? It’s as big of a leap, if not bigger, than radio to black and white TV.
Internet changed everything. Today we get information from our computers, tablet PCs or smartphones. For many of us, TV is the last place we look to find out what’s going on in the world.
But think about tomorrow. Will we get our news from some kind of wireless network you access just by talking—like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey—from anywhere in your office or house…or space ship, I guess?
It’s actually not far-fetched. Voice recognition software has come a long way and is working its way into the marketplace more and more. Almost every major corporation has some kind of IVR system as an information source for callers. We already have IVR applications that you can use to surf the web with any old “dumb” phone. And it’s really just the beginning. Who knows where we’ll go from here.
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It’s in the Language
March 29, 2011
The archeological record tells us we weren’t the only folks on the block back in the day. When modern humans migrated from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, they ran into the current residents: Neanderthals.
Imagine that—walking through a forest somewhere in future-Germany looking for a place to call home, and instead you find a long-lost cousin. Sort of.
Neanderthals were pretty much like us, but they had steroid brows and sturdier builds, especially their arms and hands. Archeologists think they were probably a lot stronger than us (steroids). And I’m guessing hairier. But they were pretty close, and evidence suggests we interacted with them and maybe even interbred.
No one really knows what happened to the Neanderthals. There’s a lot of theories, of course—from climatic changes to species genocide (by us, sadly). But let’s hope it was only displacement by a newer, more advanced two-wheeler (us again).
Which is what one theory suggests—that it was our brains and language that did the Neanderthals in. Our speech physiology (hardware) and brain functions (software) were a step ahead, which led to more complex language and, subsequently, better adaptability.
It’s not very different from technology today, actually. Evolution happens. A good example is VoiceXML—the open standard markup language (very similar to HTML) used to write software for IVR systems.
Before VoiceXML, IVR systems and the software languages used to create them were proprietary, but VoiceXML’s introduction in 2000 changed everything. It was open-standard so any programmer could learn it, and suddenly companies could take their systems with them to other vendors. Also, it was more advanced than any other IVR coding language, incorporating all the functions enterprise-level companies need.
Today, VoiceXML is the programming language for nearly every IVR system on the market. Too bad Joe Neanderthal isn’t around to see it. Thankfully, we are.
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Does Your Grandmother Have I...
March 29, 2011
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader) on Time Magazine’s naming Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year:
“Time Magazine. Always on the cutting edge…discovering Facebook only weeks after your grandmother.”
It’s meant to be funny, obviously, but it also illustrates the point that not everyone is on Facebook. While we’re all adapting to new technologies and trends like Facebook faster than we used to, they simply move too quickly for everybody to keep up.
In fact, a lot of people don’t even have Internet access, let alone a Facebook account. The reasons range from socio-economic to cultural to generational (my mother still can’t work voicemail on her cell phone, although she’s learned how to go “into” the Internet for online shopping).
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the world’s population is almost 7 billion people. But according to Internet World Stats, only around 1.5 billion people are using the Internet—about one out of every five of us worldwide. In North America, it’s more like four out of five. But in Africa it’s like one out of ten. (By the way, Norway and Iceland have the highest percentage of Internet use by nation, according to Internet World Stats. I would have guessed Japan.)
The reality is, not everyone can pop on the Internet to shop or look something up…or find a job or enroll in healthcare. As things go more and more the Internet’s way, we’re leaving many people behind. But we can use other technologies to help—like IVR.
IVR systems are web-based and can access the Internet just like a PC, and anyone with a phone can use them. While we’re waiting for the rest of the world to get “into” the Internet, we could use phone lines and IVR systems to bridge the gap. We should do it for your grandmother, at the very least.
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No Keyboards, No Mice
March 29, 2011
Even just a few years ago, speech recognition was used mainly in IVR systems. Things are changing, though, big time. Speech recognition is in a lot of places now. And it’s just the beginning.
Speech recognition converts words to text and commands that a computer can recognize. (A PC or a tablet PC or a smartphone…whatever.) For IVR, it translates voice responses into usable data for you business.
Here’s how it works—
A microphone turns your words into an analog signal that goes to the sound card of your PC or tablet PC or smartphone. A converter transforms the analog signal into a digital stream, and then the speech recognition software takes over.
The software reduces the digital stream to phonemes—the smallest units of sound used for speech. After it creates the stream, the software compares the combinations of phonemes to words in its language dictionary and, using complex statistical modeling, decides what it thinks you said.
Like piecing together a puzzle or doing a crossword, it uses the parts it’s already sure about to figure out the parts it’s not. It also uses already-identified words to differentiate between words that sound the same—if you say “there,” it looks at the words before and after “there” to make sure you don’t mean “they’re.” Pretty smart, huh? (Just wait.)
What’s in store for the future—
In the last few years, faster processors, software upgrades and better microphones have dramatically improved speech recognition. Today, it’s still crucial to IVR systems and you can also use it to control many Windows applications and smartphone functions (i.e., voice surfing the web).
But many experts feel this is just the start. According to PC World magazine, a few years from now we’ll be looking at another big leap ahead when natural language processing and artificial intelligence come into play. Natural language processing would look at whole sentences rather than just a few words to better understand you, while artificial intelligence would juice up your PC enough to understand not only what you’re saying but also what you mean. That’s either cool or freaky or both.
One day soon, keyboards and mice may be a thing of the past. In the meantime, though, get on your smartphone and voice dial or text a friend, or voice surf the web. And the next time you think about your IVR or survey system, maybe give a thought to everything going on inside it.
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Texting While Driving
March 29, 2011
110 billion text messages, on average, are sent out each month. According to Wikipedia, texting while driving has a greater impact on safety than driving drunk. About half of drivers 16 to 24 have admitted to texting while driving. There have been studies conducted that have examined the reaction time for those engaging in various activities within their vehicles. The results are as follows: unimpaired it takes a driver .54 seconds to brake, legally drunk add 4 feet, reading an e-mail add 36 feet, and sending a text add 70 feet. Nearly half of all states have banned texting while driving, with others looking into legislation to enact these types of laws. The moral of the story is that texting and emailing while driving can be incredibly dangerous. While most people are well aware of the risks that engaging in this type of behavior involves, many people still do it regardless. An interactive voice response system with speech recognition capabilities could go far in helping drivers stay safe and focused, keeping their eyes on the road at all times and their hands on the wheel. This type of IVR system could either work by interfacing with in-car equipment or via blue tooth headset. Instead of having to type out emails or texts, users could simply speak out loud what they were trying to say and the IVR system could transcribe their thoughts into a message for them. The IVR system could read the message back, allow users to designate contacts the message was going to reach, and send the message, all completely hands free! Instead of potentially endangering themselves and other drivers on the road, this IVR system would allow users to completely automate their messages, leaving them to focus on actual driving.
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Istanbul is Constantinople
March 29, 2011
The capital of the Czech Republic is Prague. The Nile is the longest river in the world, whereas the Amazon is the widest. Australia is the only country that is also a continent. At some point in everyone’s schooling, they are expected to learn facts like the ones listed and many more. A firm grasp on the discipline can be quite advantageous for even those engaging in common place conversation years later. Acquiring this sort of geographical knowledge can often times be tedious for children, and can also result in long periods of quizzing and memorization for parents. As we age, this sometimes valuable knowledge leaves us and we are stuck in a situation wondering where Zanzibar is located, or what the official language of Cambodia is. An interactive voice response system would offer the perfect solution. This sort of tool could act as both a quick reference guide and comprehension tool for adults and children alike. The IVR system could be set up to quiz children, impart facts, and allow them to acquire both general and specialized knowledge, all telephonically. Instead of placing them in front of a computer for hours on end, they could access the information from any telephone, anywhere. Additionally, the IVR system could allow multiple users on the same line, so they could engage with their friends in quizzes and contests, thus helping them both socialize and retain valuable information. For parents and adults attempting to recall an esoteric fact, they could also utilize this system to call in, pose their question, and receive answers quickly and succinctly. Instead of grasping at straws trying to remember the world’s smallest country (Vatican City), the world’s largest island (Greenland), or the country with the most land borders (China-14), one could place a quick phone call into an IVR system and have all necessary information at their fingertips!
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Blogging
March 29, 2011
Whether for business or personal use, millions of people author blog posts daily. Blogs act as a tool for companies to keep clients and prospective customers up-to-date and informed, and for individuals to update their family and friends about their lives and livelihood. While there are some great tools available for blog writing, they require both Internet access and what can turn into long sessions in front of the computer. Posting can be tedious and a huge time commitment, which is where an IVR system would come in quite handy. An IVR system that employs transcription services would help people telephonically speak what they intended to write in their blog post. Subscribers could call in, specify which of their blogs they were writing about, and compose a post completely with the use of speech technology. Instead of spending hours in front of a computer, users could speak organically about what they intended to say. This sort of system would employ speech recognition software and transcription software that would basically allow users to vocalize everything they were thinking and transcribe it as such. The transcribed document could then either be posted, or sent along to the user for final approval prior to posting. In this way, users could maintain multiple blogs without necessarily having to be chained to a computer. A simple blue tooth headset would offer the kind of mobility they were seeking, and allow them to crank out blog posts quickly and succinctly on the go! As I sit here blogging in front of my computer, I only wish that I had this type of tool available!
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Business Travel
April 29, 2011
For many of us, business travel is an everyday reality. Whether we are flying transcontinentally or 45 minutes away, many of us travel for business on a weekly or even daily basis. Business travel is worlds different than travel for leisure, with stringent time constraints and deadlines that must be met with little to no flexibility. Booking this sort of travel can be very difficult, as companies are often times located in inconvenient locations, requiring a lot of connecting flights and layovers. Booking this sort of travel can turn into a bit of a nightmare, as one needs not only to worry about flights but also rental cars and hotel arrangements. This can require visiting various websites, coordinating between several different vendors, and keeping track of massive amounts of information. An interactive voice response system would offer the perfect solution to this problem. Subscribers of a travel-themed IVR system could simply call in, specify at what time they needed a flight, hotel room, rental car, or restaurant reservation, specify whether they needed the exact time of if they were flexible, and the system would interface with various company websites and databases to return exactly the information they were seeking. The IVR system could promptly return results, then allowing users to book their reservations telephonically, on the go, and from anywhere. Subscribers to this type of IVR system could easily configure their preferences to get flight alerts and store travel information. As someone who books many business-related flights, this sort of system would offer welcome relief from the endless hours spent on Orbitz, Kayak, and Expedia attempting to book the perfectly coordinated flight.
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