To acquire new customers and to retain existing customers, companies must give credence to customer satisfaction. Call centers with well crafted speech-enabled applications significantly improve customer satisfaction, as well as provide customers with additional services and 24x7 support.

These speech-enabled applications rely on the development of pleasant and efficient Speech User Interfaces (SUIs).

If the Speech User Interface is improperly designed, constructed, and tuned pre- and post-deployment, this incurs unreasonable and unnecessary expenses that can lead to critical situations, increased problem activity, and decreased customer satisfaction.

In order to craft an effective SUI, you should follow proper and proven methodology (best practices). This Redpaper details an effective methodology that you can use to create and deliver high quality Speech User Interfaces to meet business needs. We use IBM WebSphere Voice Toolkit V6.0.1 throughout to test and tune WebSphere Voice Server to ensure it is optimally configured for your SUIs. However, it is beyond the scope of this Redpaper for specifics about programming languages used, such as VoiceXML.

We assume a basic knowledge of VoiceXML development using WebSphere Voice Server and Interactive Voice Response.

Chapter 1. Introduction to developing Speech User Interfaces

Chapter 2. Downloading and installing Rational Application Developer and VTK

Chapter 3. Rational Application Developer and VTK overview and concepts

Chapter 4. Grammar Editor

Chapter 5. Testing Grammars on MRCP

Chapter 6. Editor and Pronunciation builder for lexicons

Chapter 7. Voice Trace Analyzer

Chapter 8. Reusable Dialog Components

Chapter 9. Tuning voice applications

Appendix A. Sample code