At ATI we are experienced with a variety of telecommuniation platforms and technologies. If you have any questions about IVR and it's applications or if you would like to gain an understanding of how IVR works with other telco applications like unfied messaging and voicemail, send us an email at: sales@ati-cti.com.

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In telephony, interactive voice response, or IVR, is a computerized system that allows a person, typically a telephone caller, to select options from a voice menu and otherwise interact with the computer phone system. Generally the system plays a pre-recorded voice prompt and the caller presses a number on a telephone keypad to select an option - i.e. "press 1 for yes, press 2 for no". Some systems can also recognize the caller's simple spoken answer such as "yes", "no", more complex words, sentences and business names, or a number as a valid response to the voice prompt.

IVR uses DTMF signals (entered from the telephone keypad) and natural language speech recognition to interpret the caller's response to voice prompts. Other technologies include the ability to speak complex and dynamic information such as an e-mail, news report or weather information using Text to Speech (TTS). TTS is computer generated synthesized speech that is no longer the robotic voice generally associated with computers. Real voices are used to create the speech in tiny fragments that are spliced together before being played to the caller.

An IVR can be used in various applications such as telephone banking, order placement, caller identification and routing, balance inquiry, and airline ticket booking. Voicemail systems are different from IVR systems in that they are a one-way communication tool (the caller leaves a message), whereas an IVR attempts two-way interaction with the caller. Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) systems are often the first point of contact when calling many larger businesses, and can be used in place of a more expensive IVR.

An IVR is generally used at the front end of callcenters to identify which service the caller wants and to extract numeric information such as account numbers and to provide answers to simple questions such as account balances or pre-recorded information. Account numbers from the IVR are often compared to caller ID data for security reasons and additional IVR responses are required if the caller ID data does not match the account record.

IVR call flows are created in a variety of ways. Older systems depended upon proprietary programming or scripting languages, whereas modern IVR applications are structured similar to WWW pages, using VoiceXML or SALT or T-XML languages. This allows a Web server to act as an application server, freeing the developer to focus on the call flow. Developers no longer require specialized programming skills, as Web developers already have the tools needed to create an IVR call flow.

In telecommunications an audio response unit (ARU) is a device that provides synthesized voice responses to touch-tone keypresses (DTMF) by processing calls based on (a) the call-originator input, (b) information received from a database, and (c) information in the incoming call, such as the time of day.

ARUs are used to increase the number of information calls handled and to provide consistent quality in information retrieval.