TMCnet IVR Week in Review

By Ed Silverstein, TMCnet Contributor

It was a busy week in the IVR sector. Here are some of the major stories from TMCnet.

Radish Systems has introduced version 2.0 of its ChoiceView software. ChoiceView lets agents send pictures and video to customers, even while agents chat with the customers at the same time – using any phone – to solve their problems.

In another story, Apple will soon launch of a new form of Siri, a smartphone app, which will provide IVR capability in Mandarin Chinese. The technology, though imperfect, is impressive when one considers that Mandarin is a tonal language containing 400 single-syllable sounds which are differentiated by intonation alone. This means that the same sounds with slightly different intonations are entirely different, unrelated words.

In another story, TMCnet reported how there are two aspects of speech technology. A recent interview in The Motley Fool with Jim Greenwell, CEO of Datria, emphasizes this “dual-process” nature of the voice interaction industry. There is the speech engine itself, a complex platform programmed to recognize the human voice, then there are the applications that are built on top of the speech engine. Datria (News - Alert) uses the speech engine offered by industry leader Nuance Communications on which to build its applications.

In another report, interaction management solutions provider Enghouse Interactive recently compiled its Enghouse (News - Alert) Interactive Customer Interaction Index, a survey of U.S. IT executives on the topic of customer interactions – structured, unstructured and self-service. Nearly 65 percent of respondents indicated unstructured interactions are most valuable. The remainder was nearly evenly split in identifying self-service and unstructured interactions as most valuable.

And Handygo Technologies, a mobile value-added service (VAS) provider, has teamed up with the non-profit organization, CABI, in an effort to provide farmers and the rural population in India with mobile-based agriculture information. CABI will provide data from its Direct2Farm agriculture knowledge repository, including region-specific agricultural content, advisories and other information.

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