IVR Deconstructed

Prince William and Kate Middleton got married today and I don’t even know how to feel about it.

On the one hand, Britain’s royalty is an heirloom (read cherished keepsake) of British and, subsequently, our past. On the other hand, Britain’s royalty is an heirloom (read trinket) from a time of widespread inequality and injustice.

It’s kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the thing that makes them so special and unique also ties them to a thankfully extinct way of life. On the other, the thing that makes them dubious icons also ties them to our roots (political roots, if not cultural).

A quick history of European royals…

The fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D. left a power vacuum in Europe. After the Romans retreated, warlords took their place. Eventually the feudal system arose—landholders (warlords) gave land to hired soldiers (knights) in return for military service.

As long as the warlords had someone to fight (each other mostly, but also the Vikings and the Ottomans), they could keep their soldiers occupied. But when they didn’t have someone to fight, the soldiers turned on the defenseless populace…raping, killing, whatever they wanted (they were basically hired thugs).

At the end of the 10th century, a movement began to counteract all the violence. Pacific leaders told the warlords they should stop fighting each other all the time and protect the people, not abuse them. This became the Chivalric Code.

Over time, some of these warlords grew strong enough to create (i.e., conquer) whole nations (France, Germany…England). Warlords and soldiers became lords and knights. Royalty was born.

Back to Will and Kate…

Maybe it’s not all that important, but as Americans it’s confusing. Our entire culture (in its purest, best form) is anti-caste, accepting and equal.

(At least that’s the idea—I’m not trying to open a debate on our own culture’s inequalities and hypocrisies. And some of us aren’t so accepting…read this if you want a laugh: When Does Social Networking Become Absurd?).

Anyway, the royals are simply the descendants of the warlords that controlled Medieval Europe. In the beginning, they were all just commoners. There’s really no such thing as royal blood.

So today the royals are both cherished living history and withering symbol of past inequalities. Again, maybe it’s not that important, and it totally depends on how you view it.

What’s a little easier and way less serious is the fact that Will married a normal girl. Basically—she’s not a royal, anyway. And there are literally millions of girls across the globe going nuts over that right now. Normal girl marries a prince. It’s every little girl’s dream.

What’s also not in debate is how nuts the coverage of this thing is. It’s everywhere over the Internet, TV and radio. The BBC has its entire home page covered by it.

Communications technology is just bananas these days. How bananas? The wedding vows were already on YouTube like five hours ago. Enjoy…

Speech recognition enables users to speak their responses that then get processed and interpreted by interactive voice response systems.

In order for engines to recognize and process various voice queues, hundreds of sounds have to be previously recorded and uploaded into a database.  From there, the database will piece together concatenated speech to formulate the words into data that will be read back to the caller.

The computer will often times run into problems, however, as it is difficult to distinguish certain letters and sounds.  Databases and computers often phonetically spell the voice queues they receive, which can be problematic for text-to-speech engines to correctly interpret.  There are linguistic limitations that restrict a computer’s ability to correctly distinguish between certain words and sounds.

Especially when working with heteronyms (desert [leave]/desert [type of climate]) computers will have a nearly impossible time of distinguishing between these words, and the pronunciation will be exactly the same.  Human beings have trouble recognizing the differences and use their deductive reasoning skills to dissect the context in which the word is used.

Computers, with their nearly infinite storage capacity and brainpower, are not programmed to have these deductive reasoning skills.  Typically, there will be one programmed pronunciation for a word.  If an altered pronunciation is necessary, users would need to alter the word phonetically so that the machine could communicate it in the correct manner.

Additionally, there are several sets of letters that sound very similar to the human ear (M&N, B&T, S&F).  Human beings, in casual conversation, have problems recognizing and identifying the differences between similar sounding letters.

The military phonetic alphabet, complete with words used to identify letters, was created so that transmissions were not mistaken or fumbled (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo).  Computers have an even harder time making these distinctions in the speech recognition process.

A way to curb the difficulties caused by pronunciation and phonetics is to use DTMF input so that there are very few questions about the intended data input or output.

Is privatization the next big leap into space? Is it the one that takes us to lunar mining colonies and solar panel farms in orbit and cruises to Mars and Saturn? It might be.

Industry drives development as much as military or scientific research, and it brings it straight into popular culture in a way the others don’t. That’s when technologies really take off. (Look at the Internet if nothing else and how it’s transformed society, the way we get information and communicate.)

Speaking of which…a California-based company launched a privately built rocket and capsule into space just this past December.

The company—SpaceX—plans to enter headlong into the space race by transporting payloads and even astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). In fact, the company has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to provide a dozen transport rockets of at least 20-ton capacity, according to the BBC. The dozen rockets will carry payloads to the ISS through 2016.

And here’s the thing, really. Is it so surprising that private companies are starting to join the space race? (If we’d asked that question 50 years ago, definitely. Today, not really.)

But SpaceX’s contract with NASA is part of the U.S. government’s effort to move some of the burden of space exploration into the private sector.

So here we go. All those sci-fi movies about space mining stations (and creatures running around terrorizing everyone)—they all start here.

Moving is the cat’s meow (read sarcasm)—the hassle, the expense, the sweat, the discombobulation.

There are so many pieces in the moving puzzle, and they all have to come together at the same time. The utilities, the key exchange, the movers (paid or harassed into it with promises of beer and pizza).

Our Denver crew moved offices at the end of last week, just one block over in (LODO) lower downtown. Literally, it was only a block, but it still required movers and effort and coordination.

For example: eight a.m. moving day and the movers were supposed to be at the old office, which was already packaged and ready to go. At the same time, a phone and Internet person was supposed to be at the new office to set that stuff up so we could immediately switch phone and Internet service on and start working.

Things went pretty smoothly, actually. The movers were at the old place on time and were efficient, the phone and Internet guy was at the new place on time and got that stuff up and going.

But what if things didn’t go smoothly? It’s definitely happened before.

I remember one time I showed up at the truck rental place (bright and early to get a head start on a loooooong day) and the truck I’d reserved was still in transit somewhere.

I had no choice but to go back home and cool my heels waiting for the truck to show. Meanwhile, I’d already packed everything early, so I didn’t have anything to do. Frustrating, for sure.

Moving day is already a royal pain and a juggling act—hiccups just make it worse.

I can’t help but think it would have been better if the moving truck company had alerted me to the late truck.

If they’d had an IVR system with alerts set up, it could have sent me an early alert (either text or voice). Then it could have sent me periodic updates and let me know when the truck was in. At least it would have saved me making a trip for nothing.

So, yeah, moving is a pain. Thankfully, there’s that sense of accomplishment when it’s finally over. It’s all good then.

Markup languages are used to both format and annotate commands in ways that makes them visibly distinguishable from text.  Markup languages can serve to specify how data will be both presented and executed.  According to Wikipedia:

“Some markup languages, like HTML have presentation semantics, meaning their specification prescribes how the structured data is to be presented, but other markup languages, like XML, have no predefined semantics.” (1)

HTML is the coding language of the Internet and is primarily used for authoring web pages that can be processed and decoded by web browsers.  VoiceXML is a language that is designed to allow applications to interact with both humans and computers telephonically.  VoiceXML is based on XML, but instead of web formatting, VXML allows for the building and maintenance of call flows incorporating various interactive voice response features.

VoiceXML is similar to HTML in that they are both markup languages that allow for data processing by browsers (either web or voice).  Each language is similar in terms of web architecture, which defines the design and setup of websites or call flows.  Both languages are generated by web servers, and rely on client-server web architecture to structure their transmissions.  Client-server web architecture distributes tasks and workloads between the servers and those making the service requests (clients).

Additionally, VoiceXML is similar to HTML in that both run on four-tiered architecture systems combining data, business logic servers, application servers, and the actual markup language platform.  If a developer knows how to program in HTML or XML, they can very easily program in VoiceXML as well.

However, the functionality of VoiceXML and HTML is completely different.  HTML describes the layout of a page, including its aesthetics and purpose.  There are multiple paths that can be executed while interfacing with web pages, whereas VXML follows a single path that takes you through a call flow, and on this path you are either hearing or entering/saying something.

(1) “Markup Language,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, accessed April 20, 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markup_languages.