Yes, you have seen the title of this post right!, No typo mistake or any other mistake! I was wondering if IVR industry can be compared with any other industry and for some reason fashion industry came to my mind, pretty quickly before any other industry!

Here are few reasons why I felt IVR industry can be compared with Fashion Industry:-

1. As in Fashion industry, IVR industry too has designers who design call flow! Fashion designers design some clothes, accessories, apparels which has wide application ind ay to day life! Similarly, IVR VUI designers design various IVR systems which have wide applications in a practical life!

2. Designing any apparel requires not only technical expertise, but also artistic creativity! Same almost goes for IVR designing which involves in script writing to recording voice prompts by voice over artist in a studio!

3. Like in fashion industry, lot of design improvements in IVR are done after users feedback! And users of the both products do not care about the hard work put in by designers, developers and only care about the end product and how people are reacting to it!

4. Designers in a fashion industry design clothes for masses as well as classes! IVR designers too have to design their IVR for all, some smart users as well as not-so smart users! Many of the times fashion designers target their designs for high income groups. Some IVRs are also used in banking and some minimum knowledge like English language, Knowledge of Telephony jargon etc are expected from their users!

5. The way fashion industry uses raw materials to produce a product, in IVR industry too, raw materials like CTI boards, PCs or Servers and Software required to produce the complete IVR system!

These are the reasons why some time I feel like comparing IVR industry to Fashion industry! What Industry comes to your mind when you feel like comparing IVR industry to ?

Recently, I had a chance to work on Sangoma Board and FreeSWITCH ( an open source Telephony platform) which can also work as Interactive Voice Response system. The main challenge

Experience with Sangoma A101 and FreeSwitch

was to install the FreeSWITCH on Windows and get Sangoma board ( Model A101) work. Since I was new to Sangoma board low cost boards, I faced many problems due to lack of information availability on net for beginner.

Though Sangoma support was more or less satisfactory, but no where near the excellent support provided by Dialogic. So, few small things I learned about Sangom board which may be beneficial for people who have worked only with Dialogic board, but not Sangoma boards.

1. Sangoma drivers do not have any telecom protocol ( ISDN ) built into it. It always uses third party software for these protocols.

2. Sangoma boards are mainly made for Asterisk/FreeSWITCH and Linux systems. The basic card is cheap, but additional features like ‘echo cancellation’, NBE ( NetBorder Express – required for Windows) cost extra. So, if some one wants features equivalent of Donjin DN300 in A101, the cost will become more or less same!

3. Configuring the board is more difficult than developing the IVR system for beginner. I could not find any step by step guide for installing the card, run a demo application and test. This kind of utility is available in Dialogic, even in Donjin. Most of the time, Dialogic and Donjin support will help install the card, install the driver, do the configuration and run those demo application and hand over the system back to developer for installing their application. In case of Sangoma, we had to really, really struggled hard to get such support. At first, we were told that in order to get Sagoma board work in Windows, we will have to buy NBE as well as AFT series of board, A101 will not work! But after exchanging mail to and fro with main Sangoma support, we were finally advised to use FreeSWITCH in Windows and it worked for us!

4. Finally, Sangoma support had installed FreeSWITCH on our server and handed over to us. They compiled the recent FreeSWITCH source code along with freeTDM.

After installing FreeSWITCH, developing our IVR using JavaScript was quite easy actually. The were also good documentation about customizing “Dialplan” required to forward any incoming calls JavaScript codes.

So, I would say it was mixed experience for me with Sangoma boards. Using high level language like JavaScript has advantages as well as disadvantages too. But it surely is faster and much easier to learn then learning to write software in C++.

I hope to write a step by step guide to configure Sangoma A101 in Windows using FreeSWITCH some day.

Like any other computer software, IVR too work inputs of responses provided by the user. Though, a computer application software has widely used input devices like keyboard, mouse, voice, even hand movement, IVR applications have limited, only two types of inputs or responses. One is telephone keypad which has 12 keys and automatic speech recognition!

Another specific difference between a normal computer application software and a IVR software is, IVR can provide the options sequentially in voice while computer application software can software options in various menus, buttons, drop down menu, quick links using related graphics etc. So IVR provides its options or tasks it can perform to a caller in series of voice announcement along with key option to press or word, phrase to speak for choosing the tasks. This is known as IVR menu.

With advent of hosted IVR services, IVR application has become designing of this menu system only, while the integration of CTI hardware with various PBX systems have become standard modules provided by hosted IVR service provider.

Irrespective of direction of call of the IVR ( inbound IVR or outbound IVR), menu starts as soon as the call is picked up. Normally, IVR starts with a “welcome prompt” typically welcoming the caller with greetings and quick short brief about the service, organisation behind the IVR.

IVR menus can be divided into two types depending on how user give commands to IVR application or how user responds to its menu options, DTMF(DualTone Multiple Frequency) or Telephone driven and ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) driven. Both have advantage and disadvantages and are widely used. ( Click here for more about DTMF driven menu or ASR driven menu)

Apart from above two types of IVR menus, it can also be divided another two types depending on how menu options are generated.

1. Menu options can be recorded using a voice artist in studio and played back.
2. Menu options can be generated using TTS (Text to Speech) converters.

Again, choices in a menu, may be static or dynamic. When the choices in a menu are fixed for the IVR system, than the menu can be called as static menu while if the menu options changes dynamically depending on caller id, time of the day etc., than the menu can be called dynamic. For example:-

In a call center IVR, if a registered customer dials, he may be given different options while an unregistered customer would be presented a different options in the IVR menu.

Many people do not like TTS generated menus as one can make out the difference between human voice and TTS generated voice, specially in India, it has mainly to do with accent of the voice. TTS can be very useful in dynamic menu as well as presenting data retrieved from database where playing recorded voice may not be possible all the time.

Usability of an IVR depends mainly on the design of IVR menu. For more about usability one may check this : Usability of IVR systems.

An IVR user is interacts with IVR through it menu only. So it is very important to design IVR menu which is easily understandable to first time callers. Previously people used Visio like tools to design IVR menu. But now a days, almost all IVR development tools come with powerful, feature rich visual IVR menu designer giving DYI(Do It Yourself) feature for IVR customers.