Help or hindrance?

I read an interesting article on the front page of USA
today this morning discussing the pain that people have to go through to
get their problems solved when phoning up automated answering systems.

Systems like the Microsoft Speech Server have the potential to make the systems significantly
better for end users, but good voice user interface (VUI) design is going to be essential
- otherwise things won't be any better than they are right now with touch tone systems.

A good speech based customer support line could do far more than route callers to
the right extension number, because speech is a much more powerful input modality
than DTMF touch tones. However, if voice based applications simply replace DTMF input
with a simple list of spoken options we may not see any improvements - but I'm hoping
that our SDK encourages a much more creative approach to speech application development
going forward.