IVR Design
System Messaging, Dialog Design, Flow Mapping
Audio Creation & TTS
In addition to my primary role as NLU analyst, I also gained a lot of experience designing and creating the audio for the IVR system's prompts.
Working with Voice Talent
I got to assist in coaching our Voice Talent who was our client's proprietary brand voice.
We held two separate sessions with him and attended via video call to listen in on his live recording.
I assisted in coaching him to manipulate his vocal emphasis, speed, intonation, etc. to align with our client's brand guidelines.
The phrases recorded in these sessions were part of a large data set used to train a custom text-to-speech model (third party) to produce synthetic voice identical to our talent's voice.
Prompt creation using Custom TTS
I gained a lot of experience creating audio files using the custom text-to-speech model.
This model took input in the form of textual phrases and generated .WAV files with the spoken phrase audio.
The TTS model tooling allowed us to manipulate the style, intonation, speech, etc. of the generated speech to a certain extent, but capability was limited.
I also frequently had to define custom pronunciations within the TTS tool using IPA (international phonetic alphabet) for certain words to get the TTS model to produce the desired pronunciation.
For example, one word that the TTS model had difficulty with was "Mountain" (in the phase "Mountain Time") -- the 't' sound was absent in the default pronunciation.
I achieved better generated pronunciation by defining the following IPA pattern:
Audio Editing - Style Guides
I often had to edit prompt audio files in Audacity even after generating them using the TTS tooling for several reasons.
One important editing activity required compressing the .WAV files to a format required by our telephony platform.
I also performed some editing in order to ensure the prompts followed Brand and Style Guidelines.
Some of our technical audio style guidelines:
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all commas should receive a 0.25 second pause
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remove all sounds of the speaker breathing/inhaling before their next word
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remove any distortions or clicking sounds (sometimes produced by TTS)
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leading fragments should have a 0.5 second trailing pause
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ending fragments should have no leading or trailing pauses
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middle fragments should have a 0.5 second trailing pause
I adjusted audio prompts to comply with the above guidelines.
Dialog Mapping
Dialog flow mapping is the best artifact to illustrate user journey through a flow, and to connect flows that hand off to each other. Below is an example of a dialog flow for collecting a date to schedule a payment that includes an example of a slot that can recognize multiple types of entities.
Get Payment Date
Here is a flow map created in LucidChart depicting a dialog design for collecting a payment date.
Here's a link to view this flow map in LucidChart.
Omnichannel Design
A past IVR client was beginning the transition to cross-channel, and our team has helped get them started with a chat-based version of this IVR system, with a visual chat interface.
Omnichannel Nielsen Norman Course
I wanted to learn more about designing for Omnichannel experiences, so I took a course an "Omnichannel Journey & Customer Experiences" Nielsen Norman course in March 2023.
I wrote up a summary deck to present the information I learned to my colleagues. Click below to see the deck and more information about my experience with the course.
One of the most notable things I learned from this course was the technique of creating an "Asset Map" which involves overlaying artifacts from all channels at each interaction point along a flow to ensure consistency.
I thought it could be helpful to use learnings from this course, including creating a mini Asset Map, to explore a specific interaction that was causing callers trouble.
Asset Map: Repeat Confirmation Number
A big pain point for IVR callers in the payment flow was getting their confirmation number repeated. This issue was uncovered while helping our client begin their cross-channel journey.
I've written a case study to flesh this out -- click below.