AJAX For Telephony - Intelligent IVRs

Snap! There goes the telephone and broadband connection.....again. In this digital age, we cannot afford to stay behind or left out on our digital avatar updates or so to say keep ourselves informed.

The loss of connectivity to my broadband connection gave me another opportunity to call their customer service. I am not sure why but IVRs (Interactive Voice Responses) developed for the Indian market are still not mature enough to be customer friendly. After going through the rigmarole or entering credentials 'n' number of times, the customer service executives I am not sure why test the patience of the 'esteemed customer' by asking all the details again. If they had to ask the details again manually, why keep a good 5 minute long IVR to reach the customer service executive.

Also, another option that I saw in IVRs built else where in the world like USA, etc had an option like "if you would like to speak to a customer executive anytime during the call please press 0" or something similar. I believe this critical part is missing in the IVRs for India.

Thinking on improving the IVRs set the ball rolling for me in the mind and I had been itching to write this article since then. It stuck me that according to our co-ordinates, like place, day, time of day, etc, if we had an intelligent IVR a concept I would like to call "AJAX For Telephony" it would reasonably lower all our woes.

If you are familiar with the AJAX and other similar technologies, once we start typing in a Google bar for example, there is an auto-completion feature which suggests us based on whatever (like web history, cookies, I am not sure what). But the most important thing to note here is the auto-completion feature.

If Telephony applications had something similar built into them, then it would enormously reduce the pain of going through endless IVR menus. I am not sure if any projects open source or otherwise are working on a technology similar, but I would love to hear of anything similar even being attempted.

This now takes me to a similar technology call "Spoken Dialog Systems". The definition from wikipedia goes like this:

"A dialog system is a computer system intended to converse with a human, with a coherent structure. Dialog systems have employed text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures and other modes for communication on both the input and output channel."

More information on spoken dialog systems can be had by visiting the wiki page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialog_system.

I am not sure how similar the spoken dialog systems are to the ones that I am contemplating would be built in future. Anything to reduce the customer agony would be a delightful addition.

The AJAX like system that I talked about earlier could use co-ordinates, history and unique user preferences most likely based on the telephone number, account number, etc and build on it to provide a most likely auto-completion for the particular service requested.

I would like to build upon this basic idea and see if someone can come up with a new design for IVR technology.

Digium Asterisk Training - 5 Day Course

Enterux (http://www.entvoice.com/training/) is conducting 5 Day courses (residential) in Mumbai for Asterisk users and admins. The courses are conducted in collaboration with MTNL (?) and are aimed to make Asterisk gurus of novices. d-Cap (Digium Certified Asterisk Professional) exam is also available to be taken at the end of the course. There is some cool stuff, freebies available with the course material. Enterux is Digium Authorized Training Center.

If you are trying to add value to your enterprise by upgrading skills of your employees or just want to upgrade your skills, I guess this is a must do for budding VOIP professionals.

I hope they start a center or was dabbling with the idea of Asterisk training courses in Hyderabad, Any takers!!!