IVR Interactive Voice Response

This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to IVR and interactive voice response software as well as automatic call answering solutions. Business phone systems and toll free answering systems (generally 800 numbers and their equivalent) are very popular for service and sales organizations, allowing customers and prospects to call your organization anywhere in the country. Our PACER and Wizard IVR systems add another dimension to our call center phone system solutions. An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) processes inbound phone calls, plays recorded messages including information extracted from databases and the internet, and potentially routes calls to either in-house service agents or transfers the caller to an outside extension.

By John Hibel

(Continued from Part 1)

Choose Best of Breed

While it's still possible to build proprietary systems within the context of VoiceXML, open VoiceXML systems allow for a clean separation between the application, the platform and the speech engines. This offers considerable advantage to the purchaser, who can choose the best of breed at each layer instead of being tied to proprietary combinations of applications, platform and speech engine.

For example, VoiceXML platforms that support multiple speech engines give the purchaser the advantage of being able to select the speech engine (or combination of engines) that has the best economic or technical advantage. Instead of having to buy the speech engine integrated to a proprietary platform, purchasers can obtain separate bids for platforms and speech engines.

Figure 3: Closed/Proprietary Approach vs. Open/VoiceXML Approach

Likewise, purchasers can realize significant advantages by selecting best-of-breed applications that execute on open VoiceXML platforms. Instead of being limited to only those applications written for proprietary systems, the entire set of applications written by the VoiceXML development community can be considered.

This flexibility can be important to end-users as well. Consider a voice portal application in which callers can customize their own content selections. In a proprietary voice portal application, the caller's selections would be limited to only the application and content providers the voice portal provider has integrated to its proprietary system. If the caller's preferred bank is not included among the integrated applications, then the caller is out of luck.

In the world of open VoiceXML, callers could potentially select any VoiceXML application or content to personalize a voice portal, with a degree of freedom similar to an end user book marking a page on the Web today.. In such a case, the caller could link to any bank with a VoiceXML application by directing the voice portal to the correct URL. This degree of personalization can be a competitive advantage today, and will likely be a minimum requirement in the future.

VoiceXML Products Are Available Today

Just over a year ago, VoiceXML offered the promise of a better way to deploy speech-enabled telephony services by leveraging upon the Internet infrastructure. Today that promise is being realized in the form of commercially available products. VoiceXML platforms from at least eight vendors are now available for purchase or hosting services. At least five major VoiceXML application developer nodes have been operational for many months. And with the backing of industry groups such as the VoiceXML Forum, a vibrant VoiceXML developer community and a steady stream of innovative applications are just the beginning.

VoiceXML offers significant advantages over proprietary voice web or proprietary IVR systems. Now that VoiceXML products are commercially available, the time has come to shift investment from proprietary systems to open VoiceXML systems in order to enjoy the flexibility and cost savings that VoiceXML can provide.

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