My Beef with Paul English: Part I

Nowadays, when I open my newly arrived "Speech Technology Magazine" (and I do like the new format), I brace myself. I brace myself for yet another article announcing that Paul English "is right" and that he is "good for the industry". As I read, I literally cringe at the fawning for a man who has only contempt for what we do. And palpable fear and a hint of panic is what I read between the lines. Otherwise, how can one explain the flight from rational thought that has led many industry experts and veterans to settle that the best way to deal with someone who heaps loathing upon you is to adopt him as a latter day saint and a savior?

Here is the extent to which Paul English is right. He is right that people do not like IVR very much, or at all, and he is right that a good number of deployed IVR systems are not well designed. And that’s about it.

Now, my beef with Paul English is not that he is going about announcing the obvious. The best teachers start from the basic elements of truth, and those two observations are indeed good starting points.

My beef with Paul English is his second act: the project that he has launched to begin "reforming the industry".

Let's take a look at his gethuman.com web site. If you browse through his "gethuman standard" pages, the one thing that will strike you if you have been in the Voice User Interface (VUI) design field for any period of time is his "tabula-rasa"[0] approach to his reformation "movement". It is as if there has been NOTHING done in the VUI design field before Paul English decided to take up the reform mantle. No mention of books written in VUI design, no mention of articles, forums and other resources. To someone who is not familiar with the industry, it will surely appear as if no one before Paul English had ever bothered to care about caller experience, no one had ever thought of writing down VUI best practices or tending to voice interface usability.

What does that tell us? Well, first and foremost, that the man is not serious about reforming automation. Read his "core principles" page, for example. It smacks of hurried, half-hearted amateurism. So we end up with inanities such as, "The system should be so easy, convenient and efficient to use that people will willingly choose to use it," or "Self-service applications should have logical flow," or "No prompt content should be included unless it improves efficiency of task completion for the user." And that's about the level of sophistication that one will get.

Now, as I said, stating the obvious is no sin in and of itself. But it is a sin if the obvious is misleadingly presented as the cutting-edge final word and not as a stimulus for more serious learning and investigation. The only references that I could find on Paul English’s gethuman web site to resources for those interested in better VUI were to Walt Tetschner's ASRNews and Walter Rolandi’s VUI consulting practice. (Both Tetschner and Rolandi are members of the gethuman team.[Y]) No mention of The Enterprise Integration Group, for instance, a very well known and respected consulting firm that offers top-quality training in VUI design. No mention of Vocalabs, a highly competent agency in IVR usability. No mention even of Nuance’s Speech University. One would have expected at least a mention of Nuance, given that Peter Mahoney, according to a speech he gave in Speechtek West in 2006, went to high school with Paul English and had at the time English was about to launch gethuman.com been chatting with him for hours at a time about his Cheat Sheet. Of course, mentioning Angel.com’s IVR university would be out of the question: Paul English considers Angel.com an arch-enemy, period. Why? Because we dared respond to his Cheat Sheet with out own IVR Cheat Sheet.

The consequence is the propagation of the very ad-hoc, amateurish IVR deployments that Paul English is complaining about.