Speech enabled IVR systems are the coming up in a big way in India and also across the globe. Applications which were not thought possible over IVR systems are today becoming a possibility, for example how to input a place name to an automated IVR using DTMF, which is the usual mode, its not possible. But using speech recognition technology, these applications are becoming a reality and are increasing being used in mass scale public and carrier grade deployments.

Gone are the days when you had to type or press in your requirements, now you can simply speak out your command and the service delivery will be done. This speech utilisation has been around for quite some time in simple PC usage for example executing application commands, giving a dictation or reading out a digital newspaper, but applying these speech technologies to telecom is something which is recently happening and some very technically sound companies are investing their time and money in doing R&D on the same and finding out newer application areas for speech technologies in combination with telecom.

Speech based systems ideally have 2 components inside them, even though as a software products they are independent of each other, these components are - Automatic Speech Recognition engine, aka ASR and Text To Speech engine, aka TTS. In the world of speech based systems, both ASR and TTS are necessary. AS the name suggests, ASR is used for recognizing the utterances of the user (speech) and the TTS is used to convert any text content to speech and then playing back to user, thus giving a completely automated user handling system.

In a typical speech based IVR system, also classified as a self-service IVRS, the caller will "speak" or "say" his requirements in response to the prompts, the ASR will recognize the speech and convert to text, which will then be used as input to the system, the necessary service or information will be extracted from the backend, this information or text will now be converted to "speech" and then played back to the caller for him/her to listen. Assume a reservation process, you "say" your origin and destination city names along with the date of travel, the ASR converts your responses to text, checks with the backend for availability and passes the details to the TTS, which converts the textual data to speech and plays back to caller who listens to the travel details being played back.

We provide the complete self-service module for different application areas like -

• Ticketing - movies, games, events
• Reservations - bus, flights
• Bookings - hotels, tour packages
• Catalog sales / retnals - books, DVDs, listed items, etc
  
  

Owing to our expertise on call centre platforms and Payment IVRS, we can provide the complete implementation of a self-service speech based IVR to front end the calls, setup a call center which will work as a support for the IVRS (to help if users are stuck) and integrated Payment IVRS which will take care of any credit card payments over a secure network.