Nuance Communications, Inc.

Jennifer E Balogh

Michael H Cohen

Larry Paul Heck

Debajit Ghosh

Tracy D Wax

James M Riseman

Madhavan S Thirumalai

Naghmeh N Mirghafori

A system which uses automatic speech recognition to provide dialogs with human speakers automatically detects one or more characteristics, which may be characteristics of a speaker, his speech, his environment, or the speech channel used to communicate with the speaker. The characteristic may be detected either during the dialog or at a later time based on stored data representing the dialog. If the characteristic is detected during the dialog, the dialog can be customized for the speaker at an application level, based on the detected characteristic. The customization may include customization of operations and features such as call routing, error recovery, call flow, content selection, system prompts, or system persona. Data indicative of detected characteristics can be stored and accumulated for many speakers and/or dialogs and analyzed offline to generate a demographic or other type of analysis of the speakers or dialogs with respect to one or more detected characteristics.

Detection of characteristics of human-machine interactions for dialog customization and analysis

A voice-enabled application, which may be a voice browser, is configured to provide active help to a user. The application maintains a usage history of each user with respect to dialog states. The usage history includes various user-specific variables, some of which are valid across multiple sessions. The application maintains a number of active help prompts capable of being played to a user as speech, each containing information on a different, specific help topic. The application further maintains a number of sets of conditions, each set corresponding to a different one of the active help prompts. The application monitors dialog states during a session of a user and generates an event based on the dialog states. The application applies certain ones of the conditions to certain ones of the user-specific variables in response to the event. The application then plays a active help prompt containing information on a specific help topic to the user if the applied conditions are satisfied.

Method and apparatus for providing active help to a user of a voice-enabled application

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

Jennifer E Balogh