Organized by the Applied Voice Input Output Society and Bill Meisel's TMA Associates
AVIOS (the Applied Voice Input Output Society) and Bill Meisel, president of TMA Associates and Editor of Speech Strategy News, announce the second Voice Search Conference, following the conference's successful initial year in 2008. The conference will be held March 2-4, 2009, at the Marriott Hotel and Marina, San Diego, California. The conference theme is "Say what you want and get it!" The theme emphasizes the potential for speech recognition and other speech technologies to support quick interaction to support users achieving their goals, a significant paradigm shift away from overly structured speech or GUI navigation.
The Voice Search Conference was created largely to support three key trends:
(1) Speech technology has matured, crossing a chasm that allows it to fully meet its promise as a natural human interface. With complex access by voice to items as diverse as local businesses and song titles being increasingly deployed, a model of "just say what you want" is possible when properly implemented. When there are ambiguities in the request, a quick voice dialog can resolve them.
(2) Mobile phones are a new platform motivating speech application development. Mobile phones aren't just portable telephones, they are a revolution--"personal telephones" that are as fundamental a change as personal computers. Their small size and frequent use while driving demands a rethinking of the user interface, not simply an attempt to transplant a PC interface. Every phone has a microphone. Done properly and supported by the right technology, a Voice User Interface with a Voice Search model--say what you want-can become familiar and even translate easily when a new phone is upgraded.
(3) The mobile phone solves key problems that have limited speech interfaces in some applications. Full speech dialog is efficient in discovering user intentions, but not efficient when the desired information is lengthy or needs to be remembered. On a mobile phone, results can be delivered as text or graphics when appropriate. And, in some situations, you can't talk out loud. With mobile phones, one option is to just type what you would say; the mental model is still how you would speak the command (or you can use the more laborious click-or-touch navigation).
The Voice Search paradigm has been driven by the mobile phone, but has applications in other areas. Increasingly, contact centers are using the technology for calls from any phone-often called "natural language call routing"-again, just say what you want and get it. And expect Voice Search to go beyond the first step in a contact center call.
And Voice Search can be reversed to allow searching audio databases, e.g., call center recordings or audio/video on the Web. By processing the audio, one can in effect do a text search of speech data for analytic purposes or to find specific media and video segments where a phrase is mentioned.
Despite growing market importance, Voice Search remains poorly understood. The Voice Search Conference is designed to help companies understand what is possible, which companies are providing resources or services, how applications can be delivered effectively, business models, and good practices in user interface design using the Voice Search paradigm.
Sponsors of the conference will be announced later. Companies wishing to sponsor can contact Peggie Johnson at AVIOS, Peggie [at] avios.org, for details.
The conference is open for early discounted registration at www.voicesearchconference.com.
About AVIOS
The Applied Voice Input Output Society is a non-profit professional society, created over a quarter-century ago, dedicated to promoting the development and diffusion of real world applications of speech technology. For more on AVIOS, see www.avios.org.