{"id":1578,"date":"2010-10-27T09:00:40","date_gmt":"2010-10-27T16:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mycontactcentre.com\/?p=813"},"modified":"2010-10-27T09:00:40","modified_gmt":"2010-10-27T16:00:40","slug":"well-she-said-something-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/well-she-said-something-like\/","title":{"rendered":"Well, she said something like…"},"content":{"rendered":"

An appealing outlook on the future of language and speech technology<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Text: Dr. Ir. Arjan van Hessen<\/p>\n

Jan was desperately looking through the more than hundred audiovisual messages on his system. Brigitte had left him a message a couple of weeks ago, about a dinner reservation at Utrecht with information regarding the date and location. But now he couldn\u2019t remember the exact details. Apart from Utrecht, Jan didn\u2019t remember anything. He turned on the Home-Info system and started looking: \u201ca message from Brigitte about a restaurant in Utrecht or something…\u201d<\/p>\n

The next few years will show a change in the way we communicate with organizations and friends. The current modes will still exist (text, illustrations and speech), but they will start to mingle more and more so that it is no longer clear whether a spoken message is a telephone conversation, an instant messaging message or a skype conversation. The general view will continue to last (customer has a question or remark), but the way it happens will change a lot. This entails consequences for the receiving side of the message because it won\u2019t be immediately clear where the multimodal message should be handled. Think about a spoken message with a document containing pictures of a broken apparatus for instance. The most probable division will not be according to mode but online\/offline.<\/p>\n

Artificial Intelligence (AI)<\/h2>\n

AI will definitely find its way into the modern customer contact centre (CCC). For the field of customer contact, IA is the science that creates a human-machine dialogue showing a \u201cform of intelligence\u201d. Taken to the extreme we can state that the artificial intelligent entity is the ultimate model of the customer contact employee. It is not easy to indicate what that intelligence is precisely, but it is clear that the human \u201clinguisticness\u201d forms a great part of it. Questions need to be interpreted and answered. Smart counter questions need\u00a0 to take away the unclearness and references to previous statements (\u201clike I just said…\u201d) need to be interpreted in the right way.<\/p>\n

The fruitful combination between speech recognition, text interpretation (interpreting and classifying of the text) and information retrieval (getting the correct information based on the text) provides \u201cintelligent\u201d dialogues at the CCC. A good example of this are the dialogues based on open speech recognition where callers formulate an answer to the question why they call the company. The next steps in the development of even more intelligent dialogues are the use of emotion and the visualization of the artificial employee.<\/p>\n

Emotion<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right now we are satisfied when the computer can give the correct answer to a question. We realize that the \u201cother side\u201d is a computer and don\u2019t expect empathy (\u201chow bothersome that the mechanic didn\u2019t show up again\u201d). Telecats is working on a technology that makes sure the \u201ctone of voice\u201d of the dialogue adjusts itself to the situation.<\/p>\n

Visualization, the future, also for contact centres<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another equally important development is visualization. Systems that enable us to communicate will get a \u201cface\u201d, as shown by the rise of virtual assistants. Now these assistants are just little figures on the screen, but this will definitely change in the years to come.<\/p>\n

A good example of the integration of speech, text, vision and emotion can be seen in Microsoft\u2019s project NATAL<\/a>. In this project there is a completely virtual world where a virtual employee exists and on the other hand there is a communication layer that enables a real human to communicate with this virtual employee on an auditory and visual level. This will have a big impact on the service providing world. What\u2019s remarkable, but not surprising, is that for this project 90% of the communication is done via speech: speech is the favourite mode for us humans. The portrayed communication unites the benefits of the online and offline worlds; you can talk in a way and at a moment you prefer. The technology of Telecats is of course prepared for this.<\/p>\n

Dr. Ir. Arjan van Hessen is Head of Imagination at Telecats\/University Twente<\/p>\n

Arjan@telecats.nl<\/a><\/p>\n

+31 6 21 88 81 46<\/p>\n

www.telecats.nl<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The next few years will show a change in the way we communicate with organizations and friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[508],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}