A critical step to ensuring that your voice application is achieving maximum performance is through system analysis and tuning. After a process of capturing, transcribing, and analyzing live caller utterances, the application can then tuned for optimal performance.

Creating Well Designed Grammars

The complexity of a grammar greatly affects the speed and accuracy of the recognizer. Creating a grammar is seemingly easy, but getting a complex grammar right - building a grammar that responds quickly, and in ways that callers expect - is an iterative process that has its share of pitfalls.

A well-designed grammar is flexible enough to match most of the responses you might expect from a caller, but restrictive enough to give the recognizer a reasonably small and distinct set of options from which to select a match. A good grammar optimizes recognition accuracy and enables the recognizer to return matches with higher confidence scores. The challenge of grammar development is choosing the right balance between flexibility and restriction.

Improving Grammars with Tuning

Without regular tuning, most speech applications are destined to experience problems, leading to unhappy callers. Tuning resolves that by allowing administrators the ability to correct mistakes in their application. Developing a flexible, responsive grammar is an iterative process that depends heavily on collecting production data and feeding that data back into grammar development with tuning.

By using the Nuance Application Reporting tuning tool to query deployment data logged by the Nuance Recognizer and Nuance Dialog Modules we can review and analyze application data to evaluate application performance. The number of calls made to the system, latency values, length of utterances, and so on, are analyzed identify problem areas. We then will run different recognition experiments, by trying out new grammars, parameters, recognition packages, that help tune the system.

Proper tuning requires both tools for data collection and analysis, and expertise to interpret results. As it does for stages throughout grammar development, Diagenix provides both tools and professional service expertise in grammar (and complete application) tuning through Diagenix Professional Services.

Grammar Development and Tuning is a crucial step in improving the quality and user experience of your speech applications