Integrate IVR with payment gateway

I have a couple of questions on Voicent products … I wanted to know whether you have any plans to offer the Voicent Gateway on Linux?

We currently do not have a plan for a Linux version. But if we have a lot of customers asking for it, we will consider.

In most cases, there is no need for a Linux version since Voicent products can be easily integrated with almost any software using the web (HTTP) interface. For example, if you have mysql database running on a Linux computer, you can configure Voicent Products to use it from a Windows computer. For example, by using Voicent IVR Studio’s database action, you can simply specify the database connection string and sql statement, the rest will be automatically taken care of by Voicent gateway.

Can we integrate the same with a Payment gateway? This might be required for providing services, which require payment, using inbound calls?

Yes, of cause. The easy way is to use Voicent IVR Studio to design your IVR application for inbound calls. Within the IVR application, you can access your database, launch an external program, send emails, and interface with your payment gateway directly if it has web API. To learn more, simply download IVR Studio and give it a try.

I am looking at an IVR application wherein I would expect the input to be say name of a city and then name of the area (essentially alphabets and not numeric input) through DTMF. Is it possible to use IVR Studio with alphanumeric DTMF Inputs?

Yes, in addition to DTMF tone input, speech command is also supported in IVR studio.

There are also two basic mode of speech recognition. One is based on speech command, where the commands (or phrases) are known before hand. The other mode is dictation where the speech recognizer does not know what to expect before hand, such as dictating an email. Use today’s speech recognition technology, dictation over the phone does not work that well and is mostly not used in IVR application.

When speech command is used, it is very important to design a good voice user interface (VUI). A well designed VUI determines the accuracy of speech recognition in a major way, and in turn determines the caller experience with the IVR application. For example, it is usually very hard to tell the difference between “T” and “P” over the phone. This is also true for human, so we say “T” as in “Tom” and “P” as in “Peter”.