Design References
Booking a meeting room
This most interesting demo produced in 2020 shows how the VoiceBot books a meeting room, filling five slots randomly: a European city, a random date, a time between 08:00 and 22:00, a meeting duration (from half an hour to eight hours), and a number of attendees from 1 - 20.
Features
Randomized Prompting™
Repeat ID number as it was said by the caller
Natural implicit confirmation by OFFSPEECH at two slots
Machine initiated// mixed initiative // caller initiated
Fake business rules
Support by system initiated alternative time
Appoint a room depending on number of people
Sending e-mails to attendees
Integrating fake DB
The following older references have been added to illustrate the importance of UI Design, which still applies today.
Swisscom Voice Portal (2006)
On Nov. 15th 2005 Swisscom Fixnet launched this – in Europe - unique voice portal. It facilitates a convenient access of supplemental services (Like call diversion, three-line-telephone conferencing and Combox), news and entertainment (Like weather, sport results, daily news and horoscope). To get connected with the trilingual voice portal (German, Italian and French) callers can press the special speed-dial button of the new Swisscom landline network-telephone or call a special service number.
1. FC Köln/McDonalds- Podolski Quiz (2005)
This brand campaign-hotline quiz became a huge success. It received reaping praise and strong media echo from the German voice-business community as well as great feedback from end users and 1. FC Köln. This application combines an effective and efficient interface with an extremely error-tolerant event-handling designed for loud environmental sounds. The VUI keeps the application interesting and fresh throughout several repeated calls. Working with the soccer-star Lukas Podolski as a new voice-talent was a challenge regarding voice-coaching, but the final product turned out to be one of the most entertaining speech applications on the German market so far.
Awards:
- Voice Award 2005: Special price for “Most Sympathetic Application”
Vehicle Registration OfficeKFZ -Zulassungsstelle (aka "Krautmeier") (2004)
This contest application is probably the most famous multi-persona-application in Germany and is still heavily used in various presales activities. The Krautmeier-Prototype supports an innovative persona design by introducing 2 personas interacting on prompt-level to support an illustrative interface metaphor. Regional dialects, jokes and a detailed audio-design create an entertaining and adequate user experience.
Awards:
- Winner Voice Contest 2004
Postbank Telephone Banking (2004)
Postbank AG is the largest retail bank in Germany with 11.9 million customers. Postbank's customers manage 1.5 million checking accounts online and more than 2.5 million customers use the telephone banking service. Postbank already used a touchtone/IVR for its telephone banking service. However, the features of this system didn't fit into the bank's new multi-channel strategy. To provide encompassing, user-friendly self-services and to increase acceptance among its end-customers, Postbank decided to re-launch the system. The new voice portal offers 24/7 self-services, such as money transfers, turnovers, automated account balance announcement and information on banking products.
The modern, user-centric VUI offering four personas effectively helps users to quickly navigate to the topic of their interest. On average, 120,000 customers use the voice application each day. During peak periods up to 200,000 callers use the application.
Postbank Telephonebanking shows a variety of innovative VUI-Design features, such as multi-persona support, personalisation based on caller behaviour and call frequency, customisation (persona, pop-ups, account balance and credit information), multi slot-entry mode and a multilevel context- and error-specific event-handling.
Awards:
- Voice Award 2005: “Best Enterprise Solution”
- Most Innovative Solutions Award 2005 from Speech Technology Magazine
Futura (2003)
The virtual assistant ‘Futura’ was originally designed to illustrate the possibilities with voice recognition-based applications at the CeBit 2003 (Germany). The system covers a multi-functional phone book and a series of ideas for voice applications, such as a restaurant guide, a virtual music-shop (Music Online), a horoscope service and a local traffic-jam information center. Futura, being the trend-setting demo application at that time, comes with an intelligent dialog flow, where information is supplied on a need-to-know-base, together with multi slot input mode, short-cuts and always active commands, such as “pause”, voice-dailing by voice-enrolment, a voice controlled SMS messenger and voice-enabled real time data access. Partly ahead of its time, Futura has been a most persuasive and impressive demo-application and convinced many business decision-makers of the added value that voice-recognition-based applications can bring.