Smarter Devices

"I'm looking for a reservation for two people tomorrow night at 8 at a
romantic restaurant within walking distance."

That spoken request seems simple enough, but for a computer to respond intelligently requires a ballet of more than a dozen technologies.

A host of companies -- AT&T, Microsoft, Google and startups -- are investing
in services that hint at the concept of machines that can act on spoken commands. They go well beyond voice-enabled Internet search.

Perhaps the furthest along is Siri, a Silicon Valley company offering a "virtual personal assistant," a collection of software programs that can
listen to a request, find information and take action.

In this case, Siri, presented as an iPhone application, sends the spoken request for a romantic restaurant as an audio file to computers operated by Nuance Communications, the largest speech-recognition company, which convert
it to text. The text is then returned to Siri's computers, which make
educated guesses about the meaning.

"It's a bit like the task faced by a waiter for whom English is a second language in a noisy restaurant," said Tom Gruber, an artificial intelligence researcher and co-founder of Siri. "It isn't perfect, but in context the
waiter can usually figure out what you want."

The Siri system taps more data to decide if it is seeking a romantic
restaurant or romantic comedy. It knows the location of the phone and has
rules for the meaning of phrases like "within walking distance." It scans online restaurant review services like Yelp and Gayot for "romantic."

Siri takes the winnowed list of restaurants, contacts the online reservation service Open Table and gets matches for those with tables available at 8 the next day. Those restaurants are then displayed on the user's phone, and the reservation can be completed by tapping a button on the screen. The
elaborate digital dance can be completed in a few seconds -- when it works.

Apple is so impressed that it bought Siri in April in a private transaction estimated at more than $200 million.

Nelson Walters, an MTV television producer in New York, is a Siri fan. It
saves him time and impresses his girlfriend. "I will no longer get lost in searching Yelp for restaurant recommendations," he said. But occasionally,
Mr. Walters said, Siri stumbles. Recently, he asked Siri for the location of
a sushi restaurant he knew. Siri replied with directions to an Asian escort service. "I swear that's not what I was looking for," he said.

Mr. Gruber said Siri had heard an unfamiliar Japanese word, but did not know the context and guessed wrong.

In cars, too, speech recognition systems have vastly improved. In just three years, the Ford Motor Company, using Nuance software, has increased the
number of speech commands its vehicles recognize from 100 words to 10,000
words and phrases.

Systems like Ford's Sync are becoming popular options in new cars. They are also seen by some safety specialists as a defense, if imperfect, against the distracting array of small screens for GPS devices, smartphones and the
like.

Later this summer, a new model of the Ford Edge will recognize complete addresses, including city and state spoken in a single phrase, and respond
by offering turn-by-turn directions.

To the Customer's Rescue

"Please select one of the following products from our menu," the electronics giant Panasonic used to tell callers seeking help with products from power tools to plasma televisions.

It was not working. Callers took an average of 2 1/2 minutes merely to wade through the menu, and 40 percent hung up in frustration. "We were drowning
in calls," recalled Donald Szczepaniak, vice president of customer service. Panasonic reached out to AT&T Labs in 2005 for help.

The AT&T researchers worked with thousands of hours of recorded calls to the Panasonic center, in Chesapeake, Va., to build statistical models of words
and phrases that callers used to describe products and problems, and to
create a database that is constantly updated. "It's a baby, and the more
data you give it, the smarter it becomes," said Mazin Gilbert, a speech technology expert at AT&T Labs.

The goal of the system is to identify key words -- among a person's spoken phrases and sentences -- so an automated assistant can intelligently reply.

"How may I help you?" asked the automated female voice in one recording.

"I was watching 'American Idol' with my dog on Channel 5," a distraught
woman on the line said recently, "and suddenly my TV was stuck in Spanish."

"What kind of TV?" the automated assistant asked, suggesting choices that include plasma, LCD and others.

"LCD," replied the woman, and her call was sent to an agent trained in
solving problems with LCD models.

Simple problems -- like product registration or where to take a product for repairs -- can be resolved in the automated system alone. That technology
has improved, but callers have also become more comfortable speaking to the system. A surprising number sign off by saying, "Thank you."

Some callers, especially younger ones, also make things easier for the
computer by uttering a key phrase like "plasma help," Mr. Szczepaniak said.
"I call it the Google-ization of the customer," he said.

Over all, half of the calls to Panasonic are handled in the automated
system, up from 10 percent five years ago, estimated Lorraine Robbins, a manager.

But the other half of calls are more complex problems -- like connecting a digital television to a cable box. In those cases, the speech recognition system quickly routes a call to an agent trained on the product, so far more problems are resolved with a single call. Today, Panasonic resolves one
million more customer problems a year with 1.6 million fewer total calls
than five years ago. The cost of resolving a customer issue has declined by
50 percent.

The speech technology's automated problem sorting has enabled Panasonic to globalize its customer service, with inquiries about older and simpler
products routed to its call centers in the Philippines and Jamaica. The Virginia center now focuses on high-end Panasonic products like plasma TVs
and home theater equipment. And while the center's head count at 200 is the same as five years ago, the workers are more skilled these days. Those who
have stayed have often been retrained.

Antoine Andujar, a call center agent for more than five years, attended electronics courses taught at the call center by instructors from a local community college. He used to handle many products, but now specializes in issues with plasma and LCD televisions.

Mr. Andujar completed his electronics certification program last year, and continues to study. "You have to move up in skills," he said. "At this
point, you have to be certified in electronics to get in the door here as a Panasonic employee."

The Efficient Listener

"This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes."

But at a growing number of consumer call centers, technical support desks
and company hot lines, the listener is a computer. One that can recognize
not only words but also emotions -- and listen for trends in customer complaints.

In the telephone industry, for example, companies use speech recognition software to provide an early warning about changes in a competitor's calling plans. By detecting the frequent use of names like AT&T and other carriers,
the software can alert the company to a rival that lowered prices, for
example, far faster than would hundreds of customer service agents. The companies then have their customer agents make counteroffers to callers thinking of canceling service.

Similar software, used by Aetna, began to notice the phrase "cash for
clunkers" in hundreds of calls to its call center one weekend last year. It turned out that tens of thousands of car shoppers responding to the
government incentive were calling for insurance quotes. Aetna created
insurance offers for those particular callers and added workers to handle
the volume.

And as Apple's new smartphone surged in popularity several years ago,
GoDaddy, an Internet services company, learned from its call-monitoring software that callers did not know how to use GoDaddy on their iPhones. The company rushed to retrain its agents to respond to the calls and pushed out
an application allowing its users to control its service directly from the iPhone.

Certain emotions are now routinely detected at many call centers, by recognizing specific words or phrases, or by detecting other attributes in conversations. Voicesense, an Israeli developer of speech analysis software, has algorithms that measure a dozen indicators, including breathing, conversation pace and tone, to warn agents and supervisors that callers have become upset or volatile.

The real issue with artificial intelligence, as with any technology, is how
it will be used. Automation is a remarkable tool of efficiency and
convenience. Using an A.T.M. to make cash deposits and withdrawals beats standing in line to wait for a teller. If an automated voice system in a
call center can answer a question, the machine is a better solution than lingering on hold for a customer service agent.

Indeed, the increasing usefulness of artificial intelligence -- answering questions, completing simple tasks and assisting professionals -- means the technology will spread, despite the risks. It will be up to people to guide
how it is used.

"It's not human intelligence, but it's getting to be very good machine intelligence," said Andries van Dam, a professor of computer science at
Brown University. "There are going to be all sorts of errors and problems,
and you need human checks and balances, but having artificial intelligence
is way better than not having it."



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