I have passion about design, simplicity, and elegance. For example: I love Bang and Olufsen products. They are simple, beautiful, and the company has spent a lot of effort to understanding human factors and human interface. At home, I have a 24-year-old stereo hooked up to all sort of modern digital devices and it still sounds wonderful.

When other products on the market had knobs and buttons to tweak this detail or that, B&O user interface was simple. A single button to turn on the CD player (the receiver, preset balance, volume, and more happens automatically), and a single button to turn off all the devices. They added “color” to the CD player to achieve better sound. How satisfying!

Why do I bring this up on a blog devoted specifically to “enabling understanding”? Because it evidences how unusual it is that a modern device adapts to human needs. We have learned to adjust to computers. We use keyboards. We learn Windows and Mac OS. We learn browsers. And – as of late – we learn to speak to computers.

IVR systems, like many human-computer solutions, significantly constrain the possible scope of a conversation because there is a limit to the number of words or concepts that can be simultaneously understood. The more sophisticated the information a caller wants to convey, the more likely it is that a traditional IVR will not understand.

We’ve all experienced this phenomenon (IVR hell, as I like to call it), right? For instance – if you’re calling an airline’s IVR system to make a reservation, how does a standard conversation go? Doubtless, it will begin with something to the effect of, “If you’d like to check on a reservation, please say ‘reservation’. If you’d like to make a new reservation, please say, ‘new reservation’…”and so on.

Navigating through a series of voice prompts, you’re forced to adapt to the system’s logic: you provide single data points along a prescribed path, and ultimately (hopefully) end up achieving your objective. The fundamental premise of an IVR is that the system’s designer expects us to modify our natural conversational preferences to fit these systems. It is a constant battle and compromise between being more natural and the capability of the ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition).

But imagine, for a moment, a system that wasn’t predicated upon that expectation. “…,please say new reservation” : “new reservation”, …, etc. could become “how can I help you?” : “I want to book a room for two night on Wednesday about the 15th of August. My rewards number is ACD153, name is Yoryos Yeracaris, and charge to my credit card on file.”

Enabling truly natural conversations isn’t just the promise of Interactions, it’s what we do every second of every day. Building truly simple and elegant self-help technology, and allowing the IVR to produce a previously unobtainable level of customer satisfaction, is to me what “understanding enabled” is all about.