TuVox Speech Central

Last week, TuVox made the first major announcement of 2009 with the press release ‘TuVox “New Deal” Revolutionizes Speech Application Ownership’.

To summarize:

With the TuVox Accelerated ROI Program, companies pay a substantially reduced upfront implementation fee for the configuration and set up of their TuVox On Demand voice automation solutions.

We had a great week for coverage of this concept.  To paraphrase Dan Miller of Opus Research:

More recently, thanks largely to efforts by Tuvox and a small cohort of application development and management specialists, enterprises are being offered speech solutions in a way that more closely matches spending to business benefit.

Another positive response came from Speech Technology Magazine:

…the program reduces up-front costs common to speech technology implementations and upgrades. And this… allows enterprises to quickly see the financial benefits of a speech investment.

I’ll keep updating this as we get more coverage.  Thanks, everyone!

“Dad, can I ask you a question?”

The seven most dreaded words a parent can hear.  It means you are about to have an awkward conversation about birds, bees, storks, and maybe even a human body part or two.

You can imagine the panic I felt when my 7-year old casually uttered them.  I nodded blankly as my mind raced for the words my father had used.

The came the follow up question.

“What’s a server upgrade?”

I responded with an eloquent “Huh?” as I looked at the Webkinz logo on his computer screen.

Let me back up a step, in case you don’t know any 5 to 10 year-olds.  Webkinz are furry stuffed animals you can buy for $10-20 at most toy stores, gift shops, etc.  Each Webkinz pet comes with an “secret code”  to log into the website.  There you will find a virtual representation of your stuffed animal.

In the Webkinz world, you feed, bathe, and play with your virtual pet.  Like most things my kids are into, I don’t fully understand it, but the kids love it.

Apparently, the enormous popularity of these critters has gotten to the point where the Webkinz World IT infrastructure is busting at the seams.  Hence, the error message.

Relieved, I calmed replied to my son that if the Webkinz world was Linux-based, they may be mounting additional storage devices via the mount -t command, and if the Webkinz world was Windows-based they might be applying service packs.  And, if the virtual Webkinz  world was actually virtualized on VMware, anything could happen.  The universe might collapse on itself.

He stared at me blankly as he reached for his Nintendo DS.

The Wall Street Journal reports that so-called ’small investors’ are being routed to automated call centers instead of being connected to their broker.  The problem is two-fold: brokerage houses have reclassified a lot of long-term investors as ’small’ without telling tell; and they’re treating the shift to call centers as some kind of punishment.  Instead of selling it as a feature, they’re all put telling customers they’re now second class citizens.

This brings-up an interesting issue.  How does one best educate ones client base to see on-demand speech and other IVR systems as a benefit and not a punishment?

Answer: it’s all about the experience.  More on this later…