Interactive voice response
voice or tone user interface for telephony
Interactive voice response (IVR) systems are automated telephony systems that interact with callers, gather information, and route calls to the appropriate recipient. They operate using voice recognition and Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) input from a telephone keypad. IVR systems are widely used to manage customer interactions efficiently, improve service accessibility, and streamline business operations.
IVR systems can be used to create self-service solutions for mobile purchases, banking payments, services, retail orders, utilities, travel information and weather conditions. In combination with systems such an automated attendant and automatic call distributor (ACD), call routing can be optimized for a better caller experience and workforce efficiency. IVR systems are often combined with automated attendant functionality. The term voice response unit (VRU) is sometimes used as well.
History
Despite the increase in IVR technology during the 1970s, the technology was considered complex and expensive for automating tasks in call centers. Early voice response systems were digital signal processing (DSP) technology based and limited to small vocabularies. In the early 1980s, Leon Ferber's Perception Technology became the first mainstream market competitor, after hard drive technology (read/write random-access to digitized voice data) had reached a cost-effective price point.
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This entry incorporates text from “Interactive voice response” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.