IVR systems and services 

As of today, everyone has made a phone call to an IVR system at least once (maybe without being aware of that). In fact they are used by every telephone company (mobile or not) for their own call centers or service centers. Just think how many times you have listened to automatic and recorded voices for choosing from a menu some service, or before being switched to a human operator). IVR servers can interact in different ways with local and remote resources, and also access file systems, databases, networks and so on… so IVR systems can be easily integrated into pre-existing systems or be part of distributed systems.

With IVR systems a lot of phone services can be created and used, some examples follow:

Answering service: a basic phone service, it is usually implemented with simpler and cheaper systems than IVR ones, nevertheless using an IVR system a lot of possibilities and customizations become available:
- we can manage different voice boxes for different users;
- we can manage a remote user authentication;
- we can add a notification (with email or anything else) for every received message;
- we can transfer the voice messages to a remote server (through internet and/or email).

On-line updates on highly dynamic information: IVR systems can handle dynamic information which changes day by day or hour by hour. This allows creation of information phone services, e.g. stock price list, the latest news, weather information and forecast, daily special offers for supermarkets and shops….

On-line catalogue browsing: IVR systems can easily interface to Databases and other data sources (local or remote), so we can easily create catalogue services (e.g. for books, films, CDs, magazines and so on). Selecting category, cost and whatever else we need to, users can get lists and information about all selected items.

Booking and purchasing services: using databases and other dynamic data sources IVR systems can offer booking and purchasing for services and goods, e.g. booking a cinema ticket or a film in a rent store, the purchasing of a good a book or a DVD. A catalogue can be included (see previous point), as well as payment by credit cards or other kinds of money (see next point).

Payment services: in every country there are several kind of phone numbers with different costs for users:
- 'normal phone numbers': calling cost depends on the phone company, caller areas and calling time (these are the numbers which usually everyone has at home or office);
- 'free phone numbers': with no calling costs for the user (these numbers are often used by phone company’s call centers);
- 'pay phone numbers': the calling cost is chosen by the phone provider and, usually, is higher than for “normal phone number”; cost can depend on calling time or be a fixed amount.
With 'pay phone numbers' IVR systems can offer phone services including user’s payment, so we can sell goods and information without credit cards or electronic money transactions.

Event notification: IVR systems are bidirectional: they can both receive and make phone calls; making automatic and programmed calls, IVR system can notify about events through phone lines (e.g. appointments, meetings, expiring times, alarms for some important cases…).

IVR systems work on phone lines using audio for input from and output to the user, allowing a very easy integration with vocal systems like TTS (Text To Speech: audio synthesizer that converts written text to a vocal speech) and ASR (Asynchronous Speech Recognition: vocal analyzer that converts human speech to written text). The firsts enable IVR systems to have vocal output from written text and not from pre-recorded voices only; the letters enable IVR systems to recognize vocal commands from input voice.

With TTS and ASR systems we can have more phone IVR services:

Vocal electronic email: our email server receives a normal message, TTS converts it to an audio file and (after proper authentication) can by listened by the user with a phone call to the IVR system.

Advanced answering service: ASR can improve the answering service described above with speech conversion from the voice received by phone network to a text than can be easily sent via email, put on a web server or whatever else is needed.

Phone services for deaf and/or dumb people: we can make phone network and phone services available to people who usually cannot access them because they have are handicapped:
- dumb people can use a normal keyboard to write a text converted by a TTS system and placed on the phone network by IVR;
- deaf people can receive a voice phone call through IVR, have it converted by an ASR system to a text and displayed on a display;
- above solutions can be combined for people that are both deaf and dumb, allowing them to make and receive phone calls.

Generally speaking, an IVR system can offer on phone network every service and every piece of information offered by a web server on a usual web site. Lots of services and possibilities can therefore be made available through IVR systems. But IVR systems can offer more: phone network and channels are bidirectional, so IVR systems can have services that call users directly (web services cannot have this feature).

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