[LINK] IVR ?

[Rankine, Alastair]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jan Whitaker [mailto:jwhit@PrimeNet.Com]
> Sent: Monday, 22 January 2001 9:26 AM
> To: link@www.anu.edu.au
> Subject: [LINK] IVR ?
> 
> 
> Does anyone know if IVR in these 'call centre' services is actually 
> recognising voices or using touch pad number entry?  Why 
> would anyone use a 
> dodgy voice technology over a proven touch pad interface?


Jan,

Like you I can't imagine speech recognition being more reliable than DTMF
tone detection in general. The "unproven" claim is prettymuch FUD as far as
I can tell.

However it should be pointed out that DTMF tones do get mangled if they are
transmitted by certain low-bitrate codecs, such as G.729 and G.723.1. I am
reliably informed that in these cases speech recognition may perform
significantly better, particularly if the recogniser has been trained with
compressed speech in the first place.

Most of the VoIP protocols (H.323, H.248 and I think SIP) have mechanisms
for out-of-band transmission of DTMF tones to avoid the problem.

ObDisclaimer: my company makes IVRs using both speech recognition and DTMF
tone detection.

-- 
 Alastair Rankine : +61-2-98868926 : Avaya Labs Australia :
arankine@avaya.com