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18 August 2003 |
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13 August 2003 |
includes good stats for Peopleware fans. As you'd expect, generally an inverse relationship between how personal and 'intense' the type of interruption is (phonecall, email etc) and time-to-recover-from-interruption, except that IM (which has more presence than email) may extract a lower interruption tax. Another reason to use it in the office?
11:59:28 AM 
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The lines cross on the graph.
11:42:18 AM
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08 August 2003 |
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Softava's Q12 seems to be the first cousin of Unitap and Fastap before it. Looks like it has privileged button and keypress simplicity at the cost of requiring great digit precision [via MobileBurn]
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Fingerworks seems to move mouse gesturing away form mouse-and-screen, and place it on the keyboard [via DarrenHobbs]
1:40:25 PM
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07 August 2003 |
Notes taken at this event, ably led by Nico MacDonald.
7:34:39 PM
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3:15:39 PM
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04 August 2003 |
5000 London Taxi Points and 4000 black cabs allow mobile users to text and book the nearest available cab, night or day.
28 July 2003: Anyone who has struggled to find a black cab in London will soon be able to locate the nearest available taxi and book it, all using SMS. With SMS connectivity supplied by Netsize, London's new Taxi Point service removes the need to wait on the street searching for a cab. Instead, customers can use one of the new 'Taxi Points' - actual signs that use a unique four-digit code to identify an exact location within central London. People wishing to use the service text the location code to the London Taxi Point short code (83220). Using GPS tracking, the service will identify and book the nearest black cab from the participating taxi fleets, delivering a confirmation SMS, and an alert when the taxi has arrived.
The service will cost the user £1 and Taxi Point signs will be positioned in locations such as public and private buildings, restaurants, theatres and bars. More than 5000 Taxi Point locations will be created in London over the next three years.
Just as the 5000 Taxi Point locations finished being rolled out, the mobileworld will finally tip over and most location mapping will be done by the network, not via an intermediary sign.
Or is this done for ease of cabs: so they need to know 'merely' 5000 locations, rather than attempting to find where you are from location data that isn't granular or accurate enough? We don't understand.
[via antimega]
5:02:10 PM
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01 August 2003 |
The other thing to try on mixed IVR and human cust-service systems is press or say nothing. [via electrolite]
12:19:38 PM
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31 July 2003 |
In Testing Speech Recognition-based Applications, Part 1, Chris Bajorek tells us that sppech rec has matured enough to be genuinely useful to call centres, and advises customers to research the vendors core capabilities:
First, experience matters. The more successful deployments a vendor has under its belt, the better chance you will get an accurate estimate of time and costs. So, you need to get permission to talk directly with several customers who have gone through that process. I would ask for a few references whose projects have been completed in the last 30 days, and a few that were completed more than 6 months ago to see how well they have been supporting, updating, and tuning the system.
In part 2, he gets on to application and infrastructure performance. In addition to the basics (does it answer first time every time, play prompts without breaking up, respond to commands quickly, have a high "recognised"l percentage, and smoothly scale performance up to maximum call loads) he reminds us that
Caller attributes and call conditions that conspire to unravel your SR-IVR system's performance include diverse caller demographics and accents, caller devices that don't always produce clean speech (i.e. cell phones in marginal reception areas, cheap speaker phones, or VoIP calls with low-bandwidth vocoders or high levels of data channel impairment). Not bad enough yet, you say? How about calling in from a cell phone in a marginal reception area WITH a high level of automotive wind noise mixed in? (Speech recognizers really like that one.) Add multi-line call loads and spoken commands that "barge-in" during prompt-playback, and you're starting to understand what a real-world SR-IVR system has to deal with.
And concludes:
The point of knowing all the factors that can affect performance of your SR-IVR system is this: we should now be able to develop tests that will VERIFY such systems under real-world conditions
which we suspect most vendors are somewhat far behind with. Meanwhile the speech rec industry seems more concerned with speed and cost of development this month: TuVox to partake in the Speech Solutions Challenge at SpeechTEK 2003, where it will have six hours to devise and deploy a voice self-service solution for a pre-selected application.
11:10:39 PM
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30 July 2003 |
Rodcorp's books read in 2003 (now you know what we've been doing instead of working) and 2002.
9:45:23 PM
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June Brown may now hang up her boots. Hollywood is calling: real, live, genuine C-list celebs will call your machine and leave you a message.
[via boingboing
9:17:56 PM
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28 July 2003 |
555-numbers are fake numbers earmarked for use in movies, tv, radio etc so that real numbers don't get used (and then called). These guys have gathered together a list of 555-numbers that have been used, and where. The UK's equivalent for 555-numbers is Oftel's numbers for drama use.
[via PR-Otaku]
5:16:10 PM
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David Thomson meditates on what glued viewers to 24, and why the show fell short He hints at its fetishisation of mobile phones, which always seemed to be more than simply a plot device to glue together the different story strands and locations.
The sharpest pleasure in 24 has always been to awaken the scenarist in us all. It was evident early in the first series that hooked viewers were not simply asking story questions like, 'Do you trust Senator Palmer's wife?' Or, 'Are Jack and Nina over?' No, we were identifying with the team behind the show, and their self-imposed dilemma. We wanted to know, 'How are they going to spin this out through the middle sections without losing us?' Or, 'It's not just who is the traitor, but is anyone telling the truth?' Or, 'The secret is, it's all about cell phones.'
[...]
[T]he show required commentary. It needed its own talk show, with real-life pundits and senators coming on to discuss President Palmer's situation. It needed a great dash of what Altman tried to do in Tanner, and what Welles was always after – the organic confusion of fact and fiction. It needed to bleed over into the rest of television.
Go one step further: the commercials should have been written and directed by the show's talent, and they should have had the show's actors or characters. Thus you cut away from a car chase to have Kiefer Sutherland proposing this or that SUV. In the midst of telephonic deceit, Nina confides to the camera about the 'love-affair confidentiality' of her latest Nokia. And so on.
[...]
Someone should show it all in one day (Antonia Quirke had that idea for the ICA in London – but there were print problems). And everyone in the audience has a cell phone so they can call home. Or wherever you'd call if the bomb flashes. But the doors are locked – only as much food and weaponry as you can carry in. Give claustrophobia a chance. I told you we needed Buñuel. It's The Exterminating Angel, with Nina presiding, waiting for Jack to sleep.
Also: Top 100 British tv programmes.
[via philgyford]
12:26:58 PM
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23 July 2003 |
Gizmodo notes the new Unitap keyboard, which "works by having a grid of small dot-like keys, so rather than having each dot associated with a specific letter or number, you just press the four dots that surround the letter or number you want". Like Digit Wireless' Fastap keyboard, it is a 'single-tap' method (as distinct from the T9-style predictive text or old-school 'triple-tap') of entering text. Whilst Fastap seems closer to having product in the market, Unitap claims to offer cost and form-size improvements over it, though generally form-factors are going up as applications require larger screens, which may lessen the need for micro-keyboards.
4:50:10 PM
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17 July 2003 |
Must... make... clamshell handsets...
3:36:00 PM
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In what must be an attempt to correct the recent tendency of birds to change their song in response to cities and mobile ringtones, the British Library is working with iTouch and Mobiletones to provide authentic bird and animal ringtones for Samsung handsets. Separately, the RSPB is working with Mobileavenue to provide birdsong ringtones for Nokias. The BL's tones are "real tones", the RSPB's are standard polyphonic.
10:33:52 AM
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15 July 2003 |
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18 June 2003 |
11:10:19 AM
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13 June 2003 |
MobileLifeEvent, Earls Court, 13 July 2003: Shiny skull-faced young men and bored expogirls grinning desperately as they try to persuade you to put hand in pocket to buy a 3G/GPRS/new handset/ringtone, or to enter a competition, or just to take a free doggie bag of shitty brandware. Avoid eye-contact with the brands clawing for your attention and you can be in and out in 15 minutes. You try to ignore the sound of a dozen sound-systems mashing into each other (it's like being in an interrogator's white noise room with the volume up to 11) whilst you work out whether T-Mobile's T-Zones GPRS service is better than Vodafone's Live!. It might or might not be, you can't really tell, such is the sonic distraction.
The only popular stands: Panasonic's Legends Penalty Shoot and Carphone Warehouse's car boot sale corner.
Persuasion by sensory torture. As you leave, staggering through the other shell-shocked consumers slowly wheeling through the hall, you wonder whether you've just experienced an intense-but-safe consumer equivalent of being shell-shocked. Disney versus Nokia at Passchendaele.
8:06:20 PM
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28 April 2003 |
Opera's small-screen rendering browser technology is on SonyEricsson P800 handsets. But just hit Shift-F11 in your desktop Opera browser to see how it will interpret your website (and discover that you need to redesign your templates to be more multi-format-friendly).
12:56:06 AM
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© Copyright 2003 rodcorp.
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We're moving:
Rodcorp's new home
Voice and Mobile
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