"Intelligent design" might be controversial as a theory for how the universe was created, but it's a good way to make VUIs or" Voice User Interfaces" natural and expressive.

Sheyla Militello, who works on Loquendo's (News - Alert) marketing and business development, and who was recently appointed Project Manager for different EU projects, wrote an essay for Loquendo that points out, "The necessity of at least partial automation of customer support via CRM, mostly due to economic reasons, is anything but new. There are a huge number of companies that have considerable costs and resources dedicated to call/contact centers and that depend on them for a significant part of their business and support."

Militello says callers want to have their needs quickly and courteously met. Fair enough, but there's the classic dilemma: "From the end-user's perspective, nothing beats having an empowered and well-trained person on the organization's front-end. From the provider's perspective, well-trained and empowered customer service representatives are expensive."

In short, she says, "users and providers do not use the same criteria when measuring VUI usefulness and effectiveness. The user's criteria are, for example, 'Can I get the information or perform the transaction I want? Is the result worth my effort to get it? Do I feel like I'm receiving a valuable service?' while the provider's criteria are 'Does it reduce the load on customer service agents? Are users satisfied with the experience? Does it increase the number of users I connect with?"

Achieving a balance between the sometimes-conflicting requirements of end-users and providers is part of the design process, she points out, noting that "skewing the balance too heavily to the provider's side often results in a VUI that is overly comprehensive, loaded with options, and frustrating to use."

Her paper discusses how to automate a call center without compromising on the user's needs. She points to a poll carried out by a market research company for the Market Validation "Vocal Browsing" project where two interaction modes were compared -- DTMF vs. speech recognition -- in an automated call center architecture:

"One system comprised several DTMF menus many levels deep, and the other a VUI that routed the call automatically towards a category by recognizing the caller's requirements, but then continued with sub- dialogues and requests for confirmations. Findings demonstrated that more than two thirds of consumers preferred vocal interaction. The reason given was that, even though the system was not completely free of errors, the response feedback received was felt to be almost human.'"

The answer, she finds, is "YES - provided that intelligent interfaces, voice recognition and other technological prerequisites are not automated to such an extent that they are not able to deal with the many human and emotional subtleties that a system of that type should be able to manage."