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Automated telephone systems
can be frustrating enough under ordinary
circumstances. But if your car gets
stolen, the system that calls to notify
you had better not add to the stress,
since you bought it for reassurance
and security.
So is the thinking at San Francisco-based
Televoke, whose systems track and control
vehicles and other valuable assets.
Televoke was founded by Rick Bentley,
who wanted a way to track important
things after his motorcycle was stolen
years ago, and realized that miniaturization,
GPS tracking, and the cellular phone
network now makes it possible. He hired
Brian Krause of Adducive, based in Fremont,
to make sure the telephone notification
service was well done. A demo is available
at http://www.televoke.com, and information
about Adducive is available at http://www.adducive.com.
Bentley and Krause worked on the Portico
virtual assistant at General Magic.
While Televoke's system does not use
speech recognition or the virtual assistant
metaphor, it does use similar principles
to create a natural friendly voice that
avoids the illogical and redundant instructions
other IVR (interactive voice response)
systems suffer from.
Voice talent is important. Televoke's
voice belongs to Stacy Kray. Even though
Kray had no voice-over experience two
years and thousands of recordings ago,
she had the reassuring voice Bentley
was looking for and her background as
a singer gave her the control needed
for this demanding and sometimes repetitive
assignment. Selections from her first
CD are on the web at http://www.stacykray.com.
But voice talent isn't the only key
to success, according to Krause. "Companies
put a lot of effort into finding the
right voice and making clean recordings,
but pay very little attention to scriptwriting,"
Krause says. An MIT-educated software
engineer himself, he admits that programmers
make things easy to program at the expense
of making things easy for the users.
"It's a challenge to see how few
individual recordings you can get away
with. But that's not always the best
way."
An efficient programmer, for example,
will specify just one set of recordings
for numbers no matter how many contexts
the program needs. This makes the system
robotic, and also difficult to understand
because of how the recordings are spliced
together to make sentences.
Instead, Krause and Kray have created
one set of recordings for times and
another one for phone numbers. The intonation
makes them fit into the sentences where
they will be used. They're written people
say them aloud, not the way they appear
in writing. "Eight fifteen Tuesday
morning" is preferred to "eight
fifteen a.m. on August thirteenth."
Attention to the big picture as well
as the details helps, too. Krause supports
Televoke's commitment to making things
as simple for callers as possible. "We
just added a few steps for the vehicle
installers so that the web interface
will no longer show customers options
for features they don't have,"
he says. "Sometimes, I'd counter
resistance if I suggested adding a step
like that, but Televoke suggested this
on their own."
Krause has been a user interface designer
for twelve years, and has worked with
speech for five years, even teaching
his clients' customers how to develop
over-the-phone applications. "A
broad background is especially useful
in a role like mine," he says.
