Телефон арқылы дауыстық қарымқатынасу жүйелері

Voice or tone user interface for telephony

Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows telephone users to interact with a computer operated telephone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input with a keypad. In telephony, IVR allows customers to interact with a company's host system via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which services can be inquired about through the IVR dialogue. IVR systems can respond with pre recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed. IVR systems deployed in the network are sized to handle large call volumes and also used for outbound calling as IVR systems are more intelligent than many predictive dialer systems. IVR systems can be used standing alone to create self service solutions for mobile purchases, banking payments, services, retail orders, utilities, travel information and weather conditions. In combination with systems such an automated attendant and ACD, call routing can be optimized for a better caller experience and workforce efficiency. IVR systems are often combined with automated attendant functionality. The term voice response unit (VRU) is sometimes used as well.

Despite the increase in IVR technology during the 1970s, the technology was considered complex and expensive for automating tasks in call centers. Early voice response systems were DSP technology based and limited to small vocabularies. In the early 1980s, Leon Ferber's Perception Technology became the first mainstream market competitor, after hard drive technology (read/write random access to digitized voice data) had reached a cost effective price point. At that time, a system could store digitized speech on disk, play the appropriate spoken message, and process the human's DTMF response. As call centers began to migrate to multimedia in the late 1990s, companies started to invest in computer telephony integration (CTI) with IVR systems. IVR became vital for call centers deploying universal queuing and routing solutions and acted as an agent which collected customer data to enable intelligent routing decisions. With improvements in technology, systems could use speaker independent voice recognition of a limited vocabulary instead of requiring the person to use DTMF signaling. Starting in the 2000s, voice response became more common and cheaper to deploy. This was due to increased CPU power and the migration of speech applications from proprietary code to the VXML standard.

IVR systems are used by pharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations to conduct clinical trials and manage the large volumes of data generated. The caller will respond to questions in their preferred language and their responses will be logged into a database and possibly recorded at the same time to confirm authenticity. Applications include patient randomization and drug supply management. They are also used in recording patient diaries and questionnaires. IVR systems allow callers to obtain data relatively anonymously. Hospitals and clinics have used IVR systems to allow callers to receive anonymous access to test results. This is information that could easily be handled by a person but the IVR system is used to preserve privacy and avoid potential embarrassment of sensitive information or test results. Users are given a passcode to access their results.

Some of the largest installed IVR platforms are used for televoting on television game shows, such as Pop Idol and Big Brother, which can generate enormous call spikes. The network provider will often deploy call gapping in the PSTN to prevent network overload. IVR may also be used by survey organizations to ask more sensitive questions where the investigators are concerned that a respondent might feel less comfortable providing these answers to a human interlocutor (such as questions about drug use or sexual behavior). In some cases, an IVR system can be used in the same survey in conjunction with a human interviewer.

By allowing low literacy populations to interact with technology, IVR systems form an avenue to build technological skills in developing countries. Developing countries have a prevalence of mobile phones even in rural areas, which allows room for IVR technology to support social good projects. However, most IVR technology is designed in resource rich domains hence research is necessary to contextualize and adapt this technology for developing countries. Research in ICTD has helped tailor IVR towards social impact has created innovative applications in health, agricultural, entertainment and citizen journalism.

In the context of tuberculosis, patients need to adhere to the medicine daily basis for a period of few months to completely heal. In public sector, there is a scheme called DOTS (Directly Observed Therapy Short Course) which was the most effective source for poor population. However, this method requires the patient to commute to the clinic everyday which adds financial and time constraints to the patient. 99DOTS is a project that uses good ICTD principles to use IVR technology to benefit TB patients. Patients have a customized packet of tablets that they receive from the healthcare official who trains them to take the medicine in the sequence daily. Opening the packet in a sequence reveals a phone number that the patient needs to dial to acknowledge that they have taken the medicine. This research project was based out of Microsoft Research India by Bill Theis and who received MacArthur Fellowship for the project. The project has spun off as Everwell Technologies which now works closely with the Government of India to scale this technology to patients throughout India.

Although radio is a very popular means of entertainment, IVR provides interactivity, which can help listeners engage in novel ways using their phones. ICTD research has used IVR entertainment as a mechanism to support communities and provide information to populations that are hard to reach by traditional methods. Sangeet Swara: voice based singing platform for low literate users in India. Although this platform was for a broader audience, it saw large participation from visually impaired people. Gurgaon Idol: was a singing competition used voice system, where users could vote and sing to a number presented on radio. Polly: A voiced based viral entertainment system that allowed users to modify their voice and share it with their contacts. The authors used the virality to play relevant job advertisements for literate population. Polly's model for entertainment has been adapted to spread information about maternal health for fathers, agriculture and community generated content.

IVR has been used for community generated content which NGOs and social organizations can tailor to spread relevant content to hard to reach population. Graam Vanni: meaning 'voice of the village', is a social technology company incubated out of IIT Delhi which uses IVR as the main medium. Mobile Vaani is a product of this company which connects to hard to reach in northern India with development messages, employment alerts, entrepreneurial activities, and also conduct market research studies. Mobile Vaani network caters to 500,000 households in northern India. Graam Vaani has impacted 2.5 million house holds since it started. CGnet swara: A community generated journalism platform that provided rural populations of people in the forests of Central Tribal India to broadcast their grievances. The system was moderated by editors who listened to these messages and later transcribed these messages onto a blog.

The introduction of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) means that point to point communications are no longer restricted to voice calls but can now be extended to multimedia technologies such as video. IVR manufacturers have extended their systems into IVVR (interactive voice and video response), especially for the mobile phone networks. The use of video gives IVR systems the ability to implement multimodal interaction with the caller. The introduction of full duplex video IVR in the future will allow systems the ability to read emotions and facial expressions. It may also be used to identify the caller, using technology such as Iris scan or other biometric means. Recordings of the caller may be stored to monitor certain transactions and can be used to reduce identity fraud.

With the introduction of SIP contact centers, call control in a SIP contact center can be implemented by CCXML scripting, which is an adjunct to the VXML language used to generate modern IVR dialogues. As calls are queued in the SIP contact center, the IVR system can provide treatment or automation, wait for a fixed period, or play music. Inbound calls to a SIP contact center must be queued or terminated against a SIP end point; SIP IVR systems can be used to replace agents directly by the use of applications deployed using BBUA (back to back user agents).

Due to the introduction of instant messaging (IM) in contact centers, agents can handle up to 6 different IM conversations at the same time, which increases agent productivity. IVR technology is being used to automate IM conversations using existing natural language processing software. This differs from email handling as email automated response is based on key word spotting and IM conversations are conversational. The use of text messaging abbreviations and smilies requires different grammars to those currently used for speech recognition. IM is also starting to replace text messaging on multimedia mobile handsets.

With the introduction of web services into the contact center, host integration has been simplified, allowing IVR applications to be hosted remotely from the contact center. This has meant hosted IVR applications using speech are now available to smaller contact centers across the globe and has led to an expansion of ASP (application service providers). IVR applications can also be hosted on the public network, without contact center integration. Services include public announcement messages and message services for small business. It is also possible to deploy two prong IVR services where the initial IVR application is used to route the call to the appropriate contact center. This can be used to balance loading across multiple contact centers or provide business continuity in the event of a system outage.

Surveys show IVR is generally unpopular with customers. It is difficult to use and unresponsive to the caller. Many customers object to talking to an automated system. There is a perception that IVR is adopted because it allows companies to save money and allow the hiring of fewer employees to answer the phone. Additionally, as basic information is now available online, the calls coming into a call center are more likely to be complex problems and not ones that can be resolved in an automated fashion, thus requiring the attention of a live agent.