CompuTools Business Communication Solutions by CompuTools

Interactive Voice Response with Teleplex

Interactive Voice Response ("IVR") applications are one of the ways you can provide self-service applications to your customers.  Teleplex is a complete CTI server, and can be used to run just IVR applications, or IVR applications can be run concurrently with other Call Center functions such as Inbound CD and Predictive Dialing.

Examples of some real IVR applications developed for Teleplex include:

  • Language Net.  This is a sophisticated conferencing system that provides various ways for a caller to locate a suitable, on-duty interpreter, and then connect to a third party.
  • Voice Mail.  This is a basic IVR application common in many businesses.  The Akasaka Prince Hotel uses a Teleplex-based voice mail system for their guests, and Accel Corporation's "EveryNet" and "Message+"   services are Teleplex-based systems providing voice and fax messaging to over 1,500 companies and 100,000 users around Japan.
  • Emergency Notification.  Honda Research uses a Teleplex-based system, "ILAS", in Japan and Thailand.  Car and motorbike engines are connected to monitoring equipment, which in turn is connected to ILAS.  When an abnormality is detected during testing, ILAS can contact the engineer(s) in charge either by phone or by e-mail with the alarm details.
  • Voice / Fax Information Service.  FutureNet Corporation uses Teleplex to provide generalized voice and fax "town pages" and catalog retrieval services.
  • Order Entry.  IVR-based order entry systems make life easier both for the customer and the supplier, especially when the customer is a repeat buyer.

In addition to pre-developed applications, CompuTools can provide custom IVR application, or developers can create their own applications using TPXIVRLib, our IVR library.  Features of this library are:

  • Based on the ECTF S.100 standard, but with a layer on top so that it can be used with VB.Net and C#.
  • Supports playback and recording of audio, DTMF and tone detection and generation, and other operations necessary for an IVR application.
  • Provides SAPI-based text-to-speech support, as well as Teleplex's "speech synthesis" feature.  "Speech Synthesis" concatenates words and phrases stored in an audio message dictionary in a language-way, allowing multi-lingual applications to be created easily.
  • Polled or stored fax send, fax receive.
  • Run multiple applications on the same Teleplex server, or run applications on a separate server on a network.
  • Since most of the telephony handling is transparent to the IVR application, the developer can concentrate on the business logic.

IVR System Requirements

  • IVR applications can be run with as few as one telephone channel, or up to hundreds of channels depending on the processing requirements of the IVR application it
  • Telephone connections.  These can be either to the PSTN (analog and digital, including ISDN PRI and BRI), to VoIP (SIP or H.323 on a LAN or to a VoIP service provider), or connections to a legacy PBX.
  • Standalone systems are typically deployed on Windows XP, while IVR applications in a Call Center systems are typically deployed on Windows 2003 Server.