A company called SpeechStorm and Genesys teamed up to offer this unique self-service solution to Etisalat in Egypt.
Seeing a demo of this would be nice. But it got me thinking…
With the capabilities of today’s mobile network and cell phones, would it be nice to have a simple UI mini-application tied to the dialing of an IVR? Here’s an example:
An application called “Acme Bank IVR” can be clicked (or “touched,” for those fancy touch-screen smartphones) to invoke a call to said bank. Once the call is connected, the caller sees on his (or her) phone screen the menu options as they are presented. In other words, the IVR is synchronized with the cell phone screen.
Better yet, there can be many of these applets, and anytime a call is initiated to a number associated with an applet, the applet runs and presents the on-screen menus. The caller can simply use the speaker phone feature and navigate the IVR by also looking at the screen.
Good idea or bad idea?
Eugene
June 10th, 2009
11:41 pm
Eugene:
I’ve had the same visual IVR idea running through my head for a long time. I’ve always hated those IVR trees that announce far more options than a user can remember. Providing an on-screen reference would make interacting with them much easier.
The present difficulty, I think, is that voice interactions are completely divorced from the data interactions that could deliver visual content. As VoIP goes mobile, however, this will change.
July 6th, 2009
12:51 am
Hi,
Why not use some simpler technology like USSD in paralell to the IVR voice prompt for providing visual prompts for the end user? Thoguh IVR is in a way redundant channel when USSD is used as interaction channel, IVR could be used to provide more information of a menu option than a USSD menu which has its limitation on number of characters (160?). My assumption here is that IVR is complimenting the limitation of USSD.
I have been trying to find whether a active USSD session could be possible (with two way interaction between system and user) and be in synch with what is happening with IVR interactions. Any idea whether it will work??
The idea you proposed seems good, but perhpas takes lot of time for wider market adoption.
July 17th, 2009
7:32 am
This is actually rather easy with IVVR solutions (VoiceXML-based IVR browsers that can also stream videos in addition to/instead of audios, to a 3G handset). Combined with runtime video generation engines (like http://videofy.quinary.com/), this shouldn’t be too difficult.