rodcorp: rodcorp: Voice and mobile

Rodcorp is moving home

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 10:41:17 GMT

Ross Mayfield: interruption 'taxes' in IM, email, phonecalls

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:59:28 GMT

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?

BBC: Phone tones to beat CD singles

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 10:42:18 GMT

The lines cross on the graph.

New desktop and mobile keyboards: ugly but ergonomic?

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 12:40:25 GMT

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]
Fingerworks seems to move mouse gesturing away form mouse-and-screen, and place it on the keyboard [via DarrenHobbs]

AIGA: Understanding The Future Of Mobile Devices

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 18:34:39 GMT

Notes taken at this event, ably led by Nico MacDonald.

Mobile cameras. But not camphones.

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 14:15:39 GMT

Shaun Irving's Peanut is a mail-delivery truck converted to take 4x8 feet pinhole photos
Rodney Graham's Millennial Time Machine is is a 19th century horse-drawn landau, whose carriage has been converted into a camera obscura [via Wm. Gibson]

SMS-mapped London will let you hail a cab by txt

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:02:10 GMT

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]

WSJ on shortcuts for cutting through IVR to the human customer-support agent

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 11:19:38 GMT

The other thing to try on mixed IVR and human cust-service systems is press or say nothing. [via electrolite]

On choosing a speech recognition vendor for call centres

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 22:10:39 GMT

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.

Books read in 2002, 2003

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:45:23 GMT

Rodcorp's books read in 2003 (now you know what we've been doing instead of working) and 2002.

Todd Bridges is calling

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:17:56 GMT

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

555-list: a compilation of fake numbers from movies, television and radio

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 16:16:10 GMT

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]

Sight and Sound reviews 24 season 2

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 11:26:58 GMT

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]

UniTap keyboard: smallest single-tap solution?

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 15:50:10 GMT

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.

Nokia profits sharply down

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 14:36:00 GMT

Must... make... clamshell handsets...

Birds and ringtones imitating each other

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 09:33:52 GMT

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.

BBC: Birds hit the high notes in cities
Birds imitate mobile ringtones - birds in Denmark have started imitating ringtones. The standard Nokia tone is the most popular.
CNet: Birds sing a new tune in wireless era - "A few Starlings armed with a Nokia tune crowing on a crowded city block 'could bring a place like San Francisco to a stand still'"
Mobile phones becoming sounds of love - "The electronic tweeting of mobile phones is so widespread that some Australian birds are mimicking the sound as part of their mating and territorial songs, bird experts says."
BL: Ringtones go wild - British Library Sound Archive Wildlife Collection goes mobile
Mobiletones: Get your Green Woodpecker yaffle call here - for Samsungs
RSPB ringtones at Mobileavenue - for Nokias
Telegraph: Nightingale rings in Berkeley Sq - "Not that the development is likely to please that born mimic, the starling. The birds have started to imitate mobile phone rings but now face the prospect of impersonating themselves."

Author pseudonyms

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 13:15:16 GMT

Excellent list. A companion to a library of imaginary books.

Some speech recognition news, 18 June 2003

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 10:10:19 GMT

The Difficulties with Names: names have a zipf-like distribution - Smith covers 1% of the US population, the top five names have 5%, 2,000 cover 50% , the top 50,000 only gets us to 80% of the population, and one in a hundred names is unique.
The W3C's Voice Browser Working Group has released a new working draft of CCXML, the Call Control Language
TellMe has 16 of its top 20 wishlist customers bagged, and may roll out 411 (directory assistance/enquiries) services for network operators in the next months. Apparently they haven't updated their website since 2001 because they don't need to bother.
Speechworks tweaks revenue and profit targets upwards for 2Q2003.

MobileLifeEvent: brand overload, little content, sensory torture

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 19:06:20 GMT

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.

Opera small-screen rendering on P800

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 23:56:06 GMT

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).

Analysis: Virgin Mobile USA - Not dying a virgin

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:39:58 GMT

VMUSA has 500,000 customers after 9 months, mostly young pre-pay, mostly due to offering good customer service, good value and understandable tariffs and products:

Virgin UK and USA are not where they are today because of brand. They have achieved such phenomenal success by focusing on giving customers what they want today; voice, ringtones, messaging and all they have ever asked for during the last 10 years of the mobile industry; decent customer service, and value for money
[...]
So the brand means nothing? No. The brand is key to successful organisation, but only when it actually means something to the customer. Ask any of Virgins customers, or even anyone in the UK what Virgin’s brand actually means, and they will all tell you a very similar story based on customer service, value, simplicity and services and tariffs they actually understand, moreover services they know how to use and need. Ask even industry observers what any of the operators’ brands actually mean, or how one brand is different from the other, and they will be stumped.

Vodafone sees user experience as the battlefield, Microsoft as the competition

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:39:03 GMT

Microsoft is our main competitor as much of the strategic position will be in controlling the user experience more than the network. Under this point of view we see a serious danger as we could be marginalised as ISPs have been.

Judging from the experience of using Vodafone Live! over GPRS, there is much work to be done.

Voicemail hackers phone it in

Thu, 17 Apr 2003 19:02:29 GMT

Wired article on hackers who take advantage of voicemails with default pin numbers and AT&T's speech-recognition-driven collect-call system to get themselves free conference calls etc. Sounds like the telcos just don't care though.

ENUM: mad [user-unfriendly] scheme to bring telephone numbers to the Internet

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 18:57:57 GMT

ENUM plan to give phnone numbers unique (IP-address style) addresses likely to confuse people. "Today when you want your phone to stop bothering you, you unplug it or ignore it and give your friends a private line. Under ENUM, you'd have to configure it".

Kotelly: How to design conversational speech interfaces / Top 5 Tips and Mistakes of prompt design

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 18:40:09 GMT

Blade Kotelly, who is Creative Director of User Interface Design at SpeechWorks, suggests we aim for a haiku-like elegance, involve Producers as well as Designers, and watch our grammar. The highlights:

Great [speech-recognition] systems do it with an elegance worthy of a haiku; their meaning and impact are clear and immediate, and not a single word is wasted. The more elegant a system is, the more intuitively -- and quickly -- a caller can use it, and the greater value it offers to both clients and callers.
[...]
Most people don't realize how much error correction they do in real conversations. How often do our conversations with real people sound anything like the carefully scripted conversations of a TV drama? On TV and in movies, characters never say "Uh, what? I didn't get that last thing you just said."
[...]
The art of writing the perfect prompt is to convey ideas clearly and concisely. No extra words. No fuzzy language. A well-constructed prompt guides the caller to say only things the recognizer will understand. [...] If, however, the recognizer is looking for a particular word (such as a manufacturer of automobiles), the prompt must direct callers to answer specifically. For example, by having the prompt ask, "What's the automobile manufacturer?" instead of "What type of automobile?" we could minimize the chance that callers would say words such as "van" or "sedan." There are several mistakes commonly made that negatively affect the elegance, speed, and value of the system: providing unnecessary information, using ambiguous language, and not getting callers to focus on the essentials.
[...]
Grammatically correct language (unless it sounds extremely awkward) leaves less opportunity for misunderstanding.
[...]
When designers finally finish getting their ideas on paper, they need someone to produce their work. That's where the producers come in. Showing someone a Design Specification is one thing, but actually using a real system is something else.

And Kotelly's top 5 tips for writing prompts:

State what the application will do and how it will work before engaging callers in conversation
Design to the caller's level of knowledge at each state in the application, understanding that callers will learn terms and procedures as they use an application
Use a consistent sentence structure for all commands within a single prompt
Ensure that all prompts should have a conversational tone in language and recordings to convey ideas clearly and simply (ie: give your service a touch of personality)
Tell callers only as much as they need to know to make effective decisions -- no more and no less

And the top five mistakes:

Getting caught up in the details of the wording of an application before fully understanding its structure. (ie write flowchart, then script)
Writing overly verbose prompts (no sense of irony there?)
Repeating the initial prompt for the timeout and retry prompts
Using language not commonly found in conversation
Equating stilted language with formal language

Kotelly's book, The Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice: Allconsuming, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk