LGVista’s Professional Service team offers complete support in assisting our partners and customers in helping deliver high-quality speech applications. We provide the following consulting positions and expertise:

• Voice User Interface Designer
• Project Manager
• Audio Engineering (Sub-Contract to Walsh Media)
• Dialog Designer
• Content Producer (Application Development)
• Reporting Engineer
• Integration Engineer
• IT/Deployment Engineer
• QA Engineer
• Trainer
• Tuning Engineer

Our intellectual property in project methodology is leading-edge and proprietary. We developed this methodology to avoid the waterfall approach, which is slow, repetitive and sequential. We break the methodology down to eight key areas.  These eight areas span the complete voice application lifecycle. They consist of meetings, sign offs, milestones, approvals, workflow, documents, etc. We use proven Agile software methodologies for reiterative design/application development/testing phases, broken down into development teams/pods of VUI designers, application developers, and testers focusing on a finite set of dialogs that can be delivered in 30 days. This allows us to build a working prototype in 30 days for main menu, authentication, and transfers, as well as, building dialogue sets to work off the product backlog for the rest of the application in 30-day increments.

• Phase 1 – Discovery Phase. LGVista will lead customers to completing the customer questionnaire, performing a technical gap analysis, obtaining business analysis approvals, conducting proof of connectivity if required, and building initial project management documents.
• Phase 2 - Requirements Phase. Once the “Statement of Work” is signed, LGVista will lead kickoff meetings, risk assessments, business requirements meetings, as well as user/application/system requirements meetings. Once sign off has been approved for the requirements specification the next phase may begin.
• Phase 3 – Solutions Architecture Phase. During the solutions architecture phase LGVista will lead the design of the testing/staging/fail over/production environments.  If hardware and software needs to be procured LGVista will assist and will install, configure, and then deploy systems as required.
• Phase 4 – Design Phase. The design phase can overlap with the solutions architecture phase from the timeline perspective. Since these processes can run simultaneously, time savings can be realized.  In this phase LGVista’s designers will create dialogue specifications, call flows, dialogue traversals, pilot reports, will develop test cases, will build the initial statistical language model (SLM), conduct application architectural design reviews and finalize the dialogue specification.
• Phase 5 – Application Development/Content Production. LGVista will assist in setting up the design/test environment and build dialogs using state-of-the-art tools from the chosen software vendor or one of LGVista’s software partners.  Additionally, semantic mapping, destination development, main menu development, self-service development, audio production, custom reports development, CGI and grammar development, telephony integration, connect tags, JavaScript integration, and unit testing tasks are accomplished in this phase.  Once the product backlog for this phase has been completed, the code will be frozen and will be made available to the testing team.
• Phase 6 – Testing Phase. In the testing phase, the first pass application test is conducted.  LGVista will assist if there is a need to modify the dialogue traversals test matrix and execute a dialogue traversals test. (Note: dialogue traversal testing is to assure that you are arriving at the correct destination in your application.) Other tests such as recognition, usability, and transcription will need to be verified.  A usability test report and review would be conducted to discover what additionally might need to be built or modified.  The findings of the usability test would then be implemented in the second pass of quality assurance testing.  If there are application bug fixes to be made, those fixes will be implemented and loaded into the user acceptance test environment. User acceptance tests can then be conducted. An important milestone is to implement any user acceptance test recommendations and achieve final signoff for User Acceptance Testing.
• Phase 7 – Deployment Phase. The application is ready to deploy once the deployment plan has been generated.  Go live date will be set, but prior to going live, it is recommended by LGVista that you conduct live traffic tests with live call monitoring and analysis before you implement 100% of the call volume.
• Phase 8 – Tuning Phases 1 & 2. During tuning phase 1, data will be collected and utterances transcribed and analyzed. This will assist in speech recognition grammar tuning so the application can be updated and redeployed. Once tuning phase 1 is complete, live traffic can be set to 100%.  On-site training would be conducted if the customer requires it.  Tuning phase 2 is really more of the same, since tuning is ongoing and each pass can deliver better recognition, better grammars, and better customer satisfaction thus improving the “customer experience”.