History
Research in speech technology predated the advent of digital computers. It began with a speech synthesis project at Bell Labs in 1936 that resulted in a device called "the Voder" which was demonstrated at the 1939 World's Fair. A link between speech and mathematics resulted in a breakthrough in the early 1970s. Leonard E. Baum, and Lloyd R. Welch, invented an approach to recognition based on a statistical concept called the Hidden Markov Model. In 1961, Bell System developed a new tone dialing methodology. Bell unveiled the first telephone that could dial area codes using DTMF technology at the Seattle World Fair in 1962. DTMF telephones enabled the use of in-band signaling, i.e., they transmit audible tones in the same 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz range occupied by the human voice. The blueprint for IVR was born.
Despite the increase in deployment of IVR technology in the 1970s to automate tasks in call centers, the technology was still complex and expensive. Early speech recognition systems were DSP technology based, and were limited to small vocabularies. However, by the 1980s a number of new competitors entered the market and uptake of IVR technology started to increase, as speech recognition software developed the technology changed from DSP to a client/server architecture.
As call centers began to migrate to multimedia in the late 1990s, companies started to invest in Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) with IVR systems. IVR became vital for call centers deploying universal queuing and routing solutions and acted as an agent which collected customer data to enable intelligent routing decisions.
In the subsequent decade, speech recognition started to become more common and cheaper to deploy. This was due to increased CPU power and the migration of speech applications from proprietary code to the VXML standard.
Read more about this topic: Interactive Voice Response
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