The problem with the voice automation field is not a lack of knowledge, it is a lack of practice. We know and have known for many years what a good VUI sounds like. And we continue to learn and refine our knowledge. What is at the heart of what ails IVR deployments is the disconnect between what we know and what we encounter in the deployed IVR wilderness.
I am not going to theorize here about the root causes of such a disconnect. That would make for a fine research topic for a Technology Studies graduate student. I might venture to guess that it has something to do with the fact that telephony deployments have for long been technically complex projects with the bulk of the challenge and expense being in just getting a system to work and to keep it running. So, your ops people, the smartest and most technically savvy members of your staff, end up slapping together the IVR system for you, thus rendering usability to an afterthought at best.
Another possibility may be that only very recently have we seen universities seriously taking up VUI design as a legitimate line of training. I can tell you from experience that there is no plethora of professionally trained VUI designers out there. The good people at EIG are fulfilling a great need, but by themselves they cannot make the impact that dozens of universities minting out thousands of Bachelor or Masters degrees in VUI design can.
So, when Paul English comes along and begins to conduct methodologically unsound surveys of his website visitors (see http://www.gethuman.com/standard/
for a blurb on his “methodology”), pretending that he is seriously building a useful corpus of knowledge that will guide the industry into better deployments, one wonders if the man is serious, and if he is, why won't the industry veterans who have decided to "support" him not point out to him that the wheel he is supposedly building has already been invented?
Paul English can still be very useful to our industry and to the consumer rights movement in general. Instead of framing the struggle against bad automation in epistemological terms -- i.e., we don't have enough knowledge so let us start learning -- he could for instance engage his energies in propagating the good word about the large body of work and thinking that has already been done, or the many outfits that can help companies deploy sound interfaces. Or even more significantly, he could agitate for universities to train a solid generation of professional-grade VUI designers and developers.
Now, should we expect someone who runs a web site called gethuman.com and who has gained notoriety from publishing a cheat sheet that helps callers completely avoid automation seriously undertake such a mission? I don’t think we should. I think it is up to us to get beyond Paul English and to start tackling the true causes of what ails voice automation as it is deployed today.
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