IVR Prototyping, The Call Handling Engine, The Application Generator
IVR Tool BasicsInteractive Voice Response (IVR) is an automated telephony system that interacts with callers, gathers information and routes calls to the appropriate recipients
What Is IVR?:
"In telephony, interactive voice response, or IVR, is a phone technology that allows a computer to detect voice and touch tones using a normal phone call. The IVR system can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct callers on how to proceed. IVR systems can be used to control almost any function where the interface can be broken down into a series of simple menu choices. Once constructed IVR systems generally scale well to handle large call volumes."
"In telephony, interactive voice response, or IVR, is a phone technology that allows a computer to detect voice and touch tones using a normal phone call. The IVR system can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct callers on how to proceed. IVR systems can be used to control almost any function where the interface can be broken down into a series of simple menu choices. Once constructed IVR systems generally scale well to handle large call volumes."
This kind of IVR tools resides in the traditional powerful development ecosystem Microsoft .NET technologies. They are very powerful and does not need any learning curve as conventional C# or VB is used for coding while using the Telephonic or CTI interfaces as a component just like any button in the form. This kind of IVR development is gaining drive now for obvious reasons.
One of Complete New Tool with simple drag and Drop visual tools – Envox, Invox, Osidail, XtendIVR, OmniVox3D
Like many developing services and technologies, improvement of IVR services to have many competing methods to develop IVR software. While Googling, interacting with various IVR companies, professionals found out some different types of IVR development tools
Types of IVR Development Tools
1. Old School Of thought – Using built-in API in C++ provided by the CTI manufacturers.
1. Old School Of thought – Using built-in API in C++ provided by the CTI manufacturers.
This type of IVR developers are limiting and might become lost in the future! Most probably, Dialogic, Synway and Donjin may provide some lifeline to this kind of IVR developers as they are few CTI manufacturers with well-documented API in C++. Old IVR programmers like still prefer API and C++ as it gives power!
2. Web Style development – VXML, CCXML, VoicePHP
This kind of IVR developers treat IVR software as website or portal ( now we know why they call voice portal) and want to use simple tags for interacting with the caller. This is intended to be the open standard which will use a VXML Browser ( just like web browsers).VXML browsers are available on Asterisk as the open source also commercially available from Voxeo, I6net, Linguistics from India. Few CTI manufacturer like Digium, Sangoma, etc. support this kind of IVR development tools.
3. Expansion of Traditional Development tools like Microsoft .NET – VBVoice, Velocity
This kind of tools comes as a complete solution which has its own GUI tool to drag and drop for making IVR call flow, test them offline, organize them and even port to VXML code to host in another hosting platform! With recent promotion on the internet, this kind of tools are completely online and developers can just create an account and then start developing their IVR software! I think the number of these kind of tools is highest at present.
So, these are four majorly available IVR development tools and every tool has merits and demerits. Most seemingly, a choice of IVR development tool would mostly depend on the type of IVR software.
The one similarity in all the above available tools are, they are licensed per channel basis. Developers have to pay per channel for their production IVR software for using the development tool or VXML browser.
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