16. A computerized system for determining when to transfer a user from an automated service to a live agent comprising: a) an interactive voice response system (IVR); b) a monitoring module; wherein i) said user interacts with said IVR; ii) said monitoring module evaluates, after each turn in said IVR, a probability that said user's interaction with the IVR is good and a probability that said user's interaction with the IVR is bad; iii) said monitoring module signals an alarm to bring in a human agent if a log of the ratio of said good probability over said bad probability is below a predetermined threshold; iv) said monitoring module evaluates the probability that the user's interaction with the IVR is good using P(x|LM good ); v) the monitoring module evaluates the probability that the user's interaction with the IVR is bad using P(x|LM bad ); vi) x is a set of responses made by the user during the interaction; vii) LM good is a first classification model trained using records of one or more previous interactions classified as good; viii) LM bad is a second classification model trained using records of one or more previous interactions classified as bad; and ix) said one or more previous interactions classified as good and said one or more previous interactions classified as bad comprise, at least, prompts provided by the interactive voice response system, transcriptions of statements by a caller derived from an automatic speech recognizer, meanings ascribed to statements made by the caller, and confidence scores for the transcriptions.
16. A computerized system for determining when to transfer a user from an automated service to a live agent comprising: a) an interactive voice response system (IVR); b) a monitoring module; wherein i) said user interacts with said IVR; ii) said monitoring module evaluates, after each turn in said IVR, a probability that said user's interaction with the IVR is good and a probability that said user's interaction with the IVR is bad; iii) said monitoring module signals an alarm to bring in a human agent if a log of the ratio of said good probability over said bad probability is below a predetermined threshold; iv) said monitoring module evaluates the probability that the user's interaction with the IVR is good using P(x|LM good ); v) the monitoring module evaluates the probability that the user's interaction with the IVR is bad using P(x|LM bad ); vi) x is a set of responses made by the user during the interaction; vii) LM good is a first classification model trained using records of one or more previous interactions classified as good; viii) LM bad is a second classification model trained using records of one or more previous interactions classified as bad; and ix) said one or more previous interactions classified as good and said one or more previous interactions classified as bad comprise, at least, prompts provided by the interactive voice response system, transcriptions of statements by a caller derived from an automatic speech recognizer, meanings ascribed to statements made by the caller, and confidence scores for the transcriptions. 17. A computerized system as claimed in claim 16 wherein: a) x=r 1 , r 2 , . . . r n ; and b) each r is a response made by the user in the user's interaction with the IVR.