Darrell Knight President Welcome to the MTI Blog Thank you for connecting with MTI. Welcome to our blog about the exciting world of IVR. A little background; we at MTI have been learning, writing, emailing, texting, living and breathing all things IVR since the mid-90’s. However until now we have kept all that information to ourselves! Recently we had the revelation to share those thoughts and ideas with the world, and what better way to do that than through a blog? You will find programmers, VUI designers, network guys, marketing folks and maybe even our CEO showing up on this blog – so it should be a thrilling read. Continue Reading...

Cashing in on people with FAT FINGERS

In the IVR world we all know what a fat finger is. Just in case you haven’t heard the term before, it works like this: A caller dials a telephone number like 1-800-MYBANK1 to check their balance but they fat finger the number and accidentally dial 1-800-MYBANK2. Instead of checking his balance, the caller is now talking to some guy trying to sell him a timeshare on the Jersey shore.

The term fat finger actually has nothing to do with the size of your index finger, but is basically a typo while using the telephone keypad. Oh I know, it’s probably not politically correct these days to use the term fat finger, so for the remainder of this blog I’ll try to clean it up and use terms such as differently weighted digit and massive dactyl.

Thanks to the geniuses running American Idol, massive dactyl will soon be more popular than bling amongst 13-22 year olds. Here’s why: American Idol decided to increase the number of finalists this year from 12 to 13. American IDOL only owns the sequence 1-866-IDOLS-01 through 1-866-IDOLS-12. Here is the problem: when Johnny calls to vote for his favorite singer (the 13th to appear) he doesn’t get to vote, but he does get to chat with a nice young lady that for a minimal fee of $15.00 per minute will gladly talk to him for the next few hours.

Shame on the telco team at American Idol. Most companies purchase banks of toll free numbers from the carriers and someone at AI should have shelled out the extra $50 bucks for fifty numbers instead of 12.

Shame on the carrier, c’mon you’ve got to know that a ton of people are going to accidentally dial the wrong number. Someone in the chain should have been smart enough to know that having a few extra sequential numbers and the commonly mis-dialed numbers would be a good idea. Given the current economic situation, a lot of parents are going to be very upset at the end of the month when they find out that Johnny’s American Idol vote cost them the mortgage payment.

There is a lot of blame to go around for this monumental oversight but rest assured that some goofball is sitting in his basement watching the calls come in and planning his retirement.

The W4’s of Search

When you think about Search today, most people simply “Google”. However Yahoo is trying hard to catch up and recognizing that the desktop war is over; they are focusing their attention on the mobile platform. Their belief is that Search will become much more of a mobile application in the future and that a good Mobile Search will be much more than just typing in what you are looking for and seeing a list of results.

At the Voice Search conference today, Yahoo presented the idea that Mobile Search involves the four “W’s”: What you want; Where you are; Who you are and When you want it. Yahoo has coined the term W4 to describe this concept to those of us who can’t keep up. Or to be more technical, you are really looking at four data types concurrently when performing a mobile search – Topical, Spatial, Social and Temporal. That being said, I think Google is already well down the path to W4 nirvana and Yahoo may be too late (again). Here’s why.

As an avid Google Maps user I can attest to the fact that my desire to “map” before I embark on a road trip (i.e. on my desktop and then print it out) has now been 100% supplanted by my ability to “Google Map” during the trip. Of course this presents its own set of challenges if I am driving.  Also I do find that Google’s sense of direction competes with my wife’s Garmin on a regular basis, resulting in lively discussions about which (i.e. who) is right. (The Garmin usually wins of course! )

However, Google Maps is a great example of a real product that exhibits W3 and possibly W4-ness. If you think about it, I am combining Topical Data (What is my destination) with Spatial Data (Where do I go to get there). I have recently added Google Latitude to my mapping experience which allows me to see where my wife and kids are at any time, assuming they have their devices on. So that’s Social Data, i.e. “Who”. So there’s W3 already. The only thing left to reach a state of W4-ness is Temporal (When). Is that hard to imagine? I can envisage that soon I will be able to ask Google Maps for “places to eat” and that it will only return those things that I could do at the time I asked them. It will show me lunch spots at lunchtime and diners at breakfast. It may only show me ones that have been recommended by my Social Data base if that’s what I want and perhaps only those that are within walking distance if it has ascertained from my GPS that I am in fact walking.

If you assume that Mobile Search is the brave new world of Search then the W4 concept is very compelling. The trick seems to be the one with the most data will win. Can I see myself “Yahooing” from my mobile device at some point in the future…no, not really.

Sugar and Spice…Not!

Susan Hura wrote an interesting article for SpeechTech magazine discussing the critical requirement that a VUI designer really understands the business logic used in all of the different interaction channels offered by a client. It is worth reading just for that discussion alone. She always has good insights. FYI, I myself am definitely in the behavioral science camp, in case you were wondering. Anyway, she ended with a reference to an earlier article describing the reaction to two differently worded prompts intended to take the caller to an agent.

…”The only difference between the prompts was wording and how each influenced users’ perceptions of why they were being asked to make a selection. For the first prompt (OK, I can transfer you to an agent after you make a selection), we noted a very odd pattern: Many users selected what we knew to be low-frequency options, randomly responding with the last option they heard before requesting an agent. The reason behind this odd pattern became clear once we studied responses to the second prompt (OK, I’ll get you to an agent, but first please tell me if you need help with A, B, C, or D). Users in this case successfully and happily made appropriate selections and were almost always routed correctly; this prompt obviously motivates users to make a good choice because there is a direct benefit to them. The same benefit exists for the first prompt, but the wording makes the selection seem like just another hoop they must jump through for the sake of the automated system.”

She concludes that promising a reward for good behavior, in her words, “cajoling to cooperate”, increases caller buy in with an automated system, causing them “…to view automation as a tool for accomplishing their goals rather than as a barrier between them and a live agent.” And sure, that is our goal. But I beg to differ. I am not convinced that it is as fuzzy as all of that. Clear direction isn’t necessarily cajoling. Setting the expectation of the caller that: if x then y, is always better than: if some x or another then I can y. I would posit that the indeterminate gray area caused the random option selection, not some subtle manipulative coercion with sweet nothings, I mean, wording.

What was missing in the first prompt was the implication that the caller would be routed correctly to the agent that could best help them. Note the emotive context that Susan used to describe the caller’s reaction—“successfully and happily”, jump through the hoops for the app—when I use a tool, I rarely care one way or the other about it unless it doesn’t perform as expected.

My good friend Leslie, a Public Defender in N. GA, once explained to me that a computer was no different than a toaster. She wanted to turn it on and use it without giving it any thought. Press the buttons, and words come out on the screen. No more, no less. No interference between her and her goal. Pop! Here is my toast, hot and ready for butter and marmalade.

I believe that the VUI should do the same thing. Act like a well designed tool that assists you in accomplishing your task without getting in the way or adding to the experience at all one way or the other.

Transparency.

1 From http://ilovemytoaster.com/

For what it’s worth, this is a cute bit on another toaster. But I digress.

Mirabile Dictu

Mirabile dictu–this is Latin for “wonderful to relate, miraculous”. And those were the words that sprang into my head last week when listening to NPR’s All Things Considered on the way home.

Robert Siegel was interviewing Mark Blumenthal on the historical accuracy of pollsters as reported on his web site, www.pollster.com.

Siegel: “..a website that does for political polling what MLB.com does for baseball statistics. Let’s start with the national popular vote. It was 52% Obama 46% for McCain. Which pre-election day poll or couple of polls came the closest? “
Blumenthal: “Well, let me answer it two ways. If the margin ends up being six points, there were two national surveys that had that exactly right. The one from the Pew Research Center, on one extreme, a highly regarded traditional polling method and on the other extreme, the Rasmussen Reports automated survey.”
Siegel: “That is a robo poll, right?”
Blumenthal: “Some call a robo poll.”
…
Siegel: “What does it say if two of the very best polls getting it right in the end are, on the one hand, as you say, the Pew Research Center, a gold plated poll that we hear about very often on this program and on the other hand, the Rasmussen automated telephone surveys which people might look very skeptically at. Are there questions to be raised about methodology?”
…
Blumenthal: “I think it says that we have been maybe a little too hard on the researchers that don’t use a live interviewer. I think that the automated surveys have proved themselves to give us as good a picture of the horse race at the end as those that use live interviewers.”

To hear the entire interview, follow this link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96670546

What an astonishing endorsement from a professional statistician—that an automated survey compares not only favorably, but is described as being as accurate as a live survey!

At MTI, we have seen a lot of positive response to virtual agents, virtual nurses, and even virtual fund raisers. But this is the first time that I have heard a “civilian” tout the evidence that we have seen in our analysis: in the right circumstances, virtual is as good as real.

It makes a designer proud.

MTI at Nuance Conversations 2008

Sun and Speech, Conversations 2008 is underway at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando.  MTI is exhibiting in the “Solutions Showcase” area so if you are attending the conference this year, stop by and say hello.  In addition to meeting some really charming folks at our pod,  you can also find out how we plan to save the economy 1,000,000 minutes at a time…ahem.

Enhanced Call Progress Analysis

I’m not too big on regurgitating press releases or articles but I just wanted to write a quick note and let you know about our new enhanced Call Progress Analysis (eCPA) solution for outbound IVR campaigns. The ability to accurately determine whether an outbound call was answered by a live person or machine is vital to the success of any outbound IVR initiative. Due to the ease of use and highly reliable results our eCPA feature offers, many of our customers are already leveraging this technology to increase their CPA accuracy.

Below is a short blurb from a recent article about MTI’s eCPA:

The eCPA feature from MTI utilizes sophisticated algorithms, the power of the SIP protocol, and recent SIP gateway advances in order to provide customers with a simple way to integrate highly accurate CPA capabilities into their Outbound IVR applications.

The IVR capabilities that MTI offers, including eCPA are easily accessible through Web services and they leverage MTI’s standards based, feature rich, hosted Speech IVR platform. After initiating an Outbound IVR call, analysis is performed at the platform level and the result of the call progress is returned to the application for further processing.

In the past, customers placing outbound calls in a SIP-based environment were faced with a less-than-satisfactory solution that involved placing code within their own applications. The eCPA feature ensures that the platform performs the analysis for the customer which results in greatly increased accuracy rates and decreased time to market.

Read the full article here: MTI eCPA Feature Article

Auto Dialing Business Card

I wanted to take a moment to highlight an unique use of DTMF tones. In the IVR world, we are all familiar with the MF tones that make the magic happen within our applications. Here at MTI we are big proponents of speech recognition technology but like it or not, we realize that touchtones are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Being the weekend tinkerer that I am, I ran across an article last weekend on one of my favorite websites instructables.com. Instructables operates on the theory that the more people realize they can create their own stuff, the less likely they will be to squander our increasingly scarce resources on “cheap” stuff .

The concept of the card is pretty simple, embed a small micro controller that plays a series of preprogrammed DTMF tones. When the business card is tapped against the mouthpiece of the phone, the DTMF tones are played and the user is connected to the telephone number without dialing. If you are handy with a soldering iron you can find complete instructions here

Below is a video of the card in action. The audio is a little faint, but you get the concept.