Intelligent IVR: What it Can (and Can’t) Do…Yet
Electronic voices have been destined to answer phone calls ever since Bell Labs invented the Voder machine at the tail-end of the 1930s. These days, everybody and their mother has been greeted by an IVR (interactive voice response) phone system to walk them through a customer service calling menu in one way or another.
In fact, once the 2020s came rolling around, call center IVR setups started getting smarter than ever before—ultimately reshaping how call centers operate.
In particular, Intelligent IVR systems were introduced as the smarter cousins of traditional IVRs. They use advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to understand human speech, react to real-time requests, and even predict customer needs.