Identify and Fix Problems After Deployment

After an initial deployment of Interaction Speech Recognition, test your system to ensure that Interaction Speech Recognition recognizes caller responses correctly. After testing, you may need to improve your grammars to account for the following items:

• Unexpected responses, including commonly occurring optional words that you did not include originally:

  • If the unexpected responses are a new interpretation that you want to act upon, include those responses in new rules.

  • If the unexpected responses are words that you did not include for an existing rule, add those responses as extra or optional words in that rule.

• Variations or alternate pronunciations in caller responses to a prompt:

  • Ensure that the variation or alternate pronunciation is a common occurrence in caller responses. Do not add to the grammar for one instance of the problem.

  • Add the variation or alternate pronunciation to existing rules. Do not create new rules for the variation that would return the same semantic interpretation as an existing rule.

• Misrecognized or missed responses:

  • Ensure that you are allowing enough time for the caller to provide a complete response.

  • Ensure that the call had enough audio clarity to facilitate recognition of the response. A call with low audio quality significantly impacts speech recognition.

  • Adjust your systems that receive interpretations not to act when the confidence level of an interpretation is below a certain value.

  • Analyze your grammars to determine whether you can modify the rules to increase confidence levels, such as making a word of a phrase optional instead of required. For example, in a grammar in ABNF format, change technical support representative to [technical] support representative or [technical] support ([rep] | [representative] | [person]).

• Identify and correct ambiguity in grammars. For more information, see Remove Ambiguity.

• Poor audio quality issues based on listening to recordings:

  • Ensure that no excessive noise—background noise in the caller's environment or noise introduced in the lines of communication—is present. Excessive noise can cause missed responses, inaccurate recognitions, and low confidence levels.

  • Test your IVR grammars using codecs with higher bandwidths, such as G.711. Low-bandwidth codecs reduce dynamic audio ranges, which can result in decreased recognitions and lower confidence levels.

  • Disable silence suppression to reduce bandwidth. Silence suppression is a telephony feature where audio doesn't transmit for one party while the other party is speaking or playing audio. Silence suppression could cause clipping of audio where a party speaks and the feature doesn't deactivate quickly. This situation could result in Interaction Speech Recognition not receiving and analyzing the first portion of a response.