Chapter Seven. Production And Branding

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire , you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

” GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

At this point, the Design Specification has been completed. The designer and the client have agreed that the language in the document is appropriate, speech scientists have reviewed the design for recognition tasks that have been specified but might be hard for the recognizer to perform, and programmers have reviewed the document to ensure that the logic of the call flow is sound and programmable. It's now time to render the speech-recognition system ”that is, to program and produce it.

There are many ways to program speech systems using any of a variety of programming languages and development environments available on the market. The most popular ones include touchtone development toolkits that have been modified to incorporate the use of speech-recognition engines, as well as some built from the ground up. And while these programming environments all differ slightly, they all attempt to achieve the similar goals of providing a simple way to integrate a telephony environment with a speech-recognition engine and a database as well as a few other technologies. But when thinking about the production of the system, the only thing that really matters is that the completed program remains true to the design of the application, no matter which operating system it's designed upon.

When designers also have to be programmers, they have been known to cut programming corners to make the application easier to implement and test. Sometimes this corner cutting doesn't affect the end product significantly. However, if done indiscriminately, it can undermine the elegance of certain design elements ”and compromise the end result.