WHY TUNE?

Optimizing Performance Through Tuning.

In order to optimize the interface’s performance, tuning is a necessary activity throughout the entire speech interface life cycle. While some applications have suffered sub-optimal performance from day one, most suffer chronic performance degradation from a variety of factors including:

New caller populations — Different accents, language usage, demographics, and even vocabulary impact engine and interface performance.

Proficiency curve — Callers become adept at using the speech interface and begin taking shortcuts that the interface can’t handle.

Changing business context — Callers stay the same but expectations and intent change
Prompt changes – Innocuous changes to prompts can have unintended recognition consequences.

Back-end data updates — Dynamically generated data elements and updates that impact grammars can create confusability.

Process re-engineering — New business process may not be reflected in self-service applications
Individually or in aggregate, these factors all contribute to interface degradation.

Review VA’s Tuning Case Studies for industry examples of how tuning can significantly improve application performance and customer satisfaction, and Tuning ROI to understand the business case of tuning.