From the beginning of its activities in 1993, eurovoice has been an advocate of well designed computer telephony solutions.

The key to a well designed system lies largely with the quality of the design of the interactive voice dialogue.   An optimum dialogue enables callers to interact with automated systems as easily as possible.  This not only leads to greater user satisfaction, but results in a higher percentage of calls that are handled automatically.  A good dialogue design is even more important when speech recognition is being used.  In these cases, it cannot always be assumed that what was recognised was what the caller said, so input confirmation and ease of correction becomes critical.

To this end, eurovoice has been an active partner with European Commission (ACTS) funded projects such as Dialogues 2000.  These projects addressed the user-trialling of advanced speech-recognition enabled computer telephony systems.  Their results have been used directly by eurovoice to help deploy well designed dialogues.

The research output from the Dialogues 2000 project addressed issues such as:-

• The use of tones
• Attitudes to voices
• Navigation in structured and unstructured menus
• Help strategies
• The grouping of numbers such as PINs, telephone numbers, account numbers, 16-digit credit cards