Advantages of Voicent's
IVR Studio
- One time purchase, use forever
- No monthly fee, no contract
- Setup in less than 10 minutes
- Works on any PC
- Feature rich and yet easy to use
- You can try it before you buy it
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What is IVR?
IVR - short for Interactive Voice Response - automates interaction with telephone callers. Most people are familiar with IVR applications. These applications allow users to retrieve information such as bank balances, flight schedules, and movie show times from any telephone and without the help of a live operator.
What is Inbound, Outbound IVR?
Most IVR systems are for inbound applications. Voicent IVR solution also supports outbound applications, such as BroadcastByPhone autodialer.
How is Voicent's IVR different?
Traditional IVR systems use proprietary software and expensive telephony hardware. Voicent IVR system is based on VoiceXML, an Internet open standard, so it is easy to integrate with other software applications. It can be deployed on any PC with a voice modem, an off-the-shelf standard computer component. That makes the cost of having your own IVR system extremely low.
How do you integrate IVR with existing systems?
Voicent's IVR platform supports two integration methods--HTTP and Java. With HTTP, an Internet protocol for the World Wide Web, the system can easily connect to any website. For other applications, any program written in Java can be easily integrated using Voicent's IVR software.
Why should I integrate my phone and CRM systems?
Integrating a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system enables agents to quickly gain access to customer information on inbound and outbound calls, increasing operational efficiency and providing an improved customer experience. For example, with Voicent TelephonyCRM, all calls with caller ID are automatically saved. When a customer calls back, a screen popup with customer profile and call history is displayed on an agent's computer. Based on the customer's category, it can further direct which IVR application to use to answer the call, meaning the call can be automatically transferred to a specific person or department.
What can I do with IVR & Text-to-Speech capabilities?
A flexible IVR system can deliver dynamically generated content, such as account balances, when interacting with callers. The information is relayed to the caller by using a Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine, which reads aloud text in specified data fields.
IVR Samples
Voice mail is a built-in feature of Voicent Flex PBX software. Here we simply use it as a sample to demonstrate some basic ideas of IVR Studio Design. This sample is basically an answering machine. Other voice mail samples in this library will extend the feature set, such as adding more mailboxes and voicemail to email.
The Call Flow
The call flow is straightforward for an answering machine applications. It consists of one Record Element and one Prompt Element. A record element sets the system in recording mode. A caller can end the pound key (#) or simply hang up to finished the recording. A Prompt Element plays the prompts defined in the element.
You can open this design by selecting File > Samples > Voicemail from the program main menu.
Setup voicemail prompt
A record element (Leave Message element in the call flow diagram) requires audio message to prompt a caller to start recording. You can use three types of prompts described in the Auto Attendant sample. Here we are going to use a text-to-speech engine to generate an audio file. Please note that you need Voicent Text-to-Speech PlugIn.
Select Audio > Create Audio by Text-to-Speech... from the program main menu. Simply type in any text, and click Save to Wave... button.
To set the newly generated audio file for an element prompt, right mouse click on an element, then choose Properties... from the popup menu. Click the Prompt tab, then click the New... button. Click the Browse button to select the newly created audio file.
Deployment
You can use the sample application as is. To deploy the application, select Deploy > Submit to Gateway... from the program main menu. If the menu item is grayed out, select Validate... first.
If you have multiple IVR application deployed, please see IVR select application for more information.
Once deployed, restart the gateway to have the changes to take effect.
When an incoming call is answered by the gateway, the application will execute the record element, which first plays the Prompt, and then wait for caller to record his or her message. If the caller presses #, it then executes the Prompt Element, which plays the thank-you message.
The voice mail message is saved on your computer as an audio file. You can find the audio file under the folder:
C:\Program Files\Voicent\Gateway\apps\<deployment name>\recording
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