Top 10 Tips for Designing Telephony Applications

here's a strong chance that you've used a speech-based application at least once—to access your bank information, check the status of an airline flight, or get the latest weather—because the number and breadth of speech-based applications is growing every day. One reason for this growth is obvious, the increasing use of cell phones, but another is the idea that information must be available quickly and easily twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Most companies cannot afford to keep staff on hand to answer telephones at all times of the day and night. So, telephony applications that let callers access data by telephone have emerged as a logical choice.

For telephony applications, the user interface is the telephone itself. These applications receive input through spoken commands or through DTMF (Dual Tone Multi-frequency), when users press keys on the telephone keypad. Telephony applications are not new; they're also known as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. Large organizations and call centers have been using them for years. Recently however, the technology behind speech recognition and speech synthesis has advanced significantly.