Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Despite having a reputation as an early adopter . . .

. . . of almost any technology , I'm late in joining the world of blogging.

For just over a year now, I've been helping a client navigate the diverse world of speech recognition. Beginning with the issue that they had a capacity problem in their existing call centers and the idea that they wanted to add speech recognition based self-service to both relieve the capacity problem and to improve their overall customer service experience.

It's been an unusual experience for me. My typical engagement is very focused. I come in to help solve some specific problem or issue and depart as soon as that job is completed. This engagement has been very different in that I joined with my client for their entire journey from idea to completed delivery and post-implementation managment. It's been one of those rare opportunities to start with a blank page and to apply everything I've ever learned about "doing this the right way". It's been my job to act as a mentor, educating them, guiding them and making sure they "stayed between the white lines on the road" so to speak.

I decided to start this blog as a way of capturing what I've learned in the process and share that experience in a way that would help others new to speech recogntion accelerate their own learning curve. Both my client and I still have some unanswered questions and I thought that a blog might be an interesting way to create a community of others with similar questions, issues and experiences who are interested in sharing their own journey.

As this moves forward I hope to share with you what we've learned and explore what we've yet to answer.

Cheers,
-Jeff