What is your interactive voice platform?

Question

For those of you who work in the voice space, what do you use as an IVR platform? I am using Microsoft Speech Server 2007. What are some equivalent packages? Does anyone use open source software to handle incoming or outgoing calls? Please note that I'm not just talking about speech recognition, which is one of the components of a comprehensive package. The IVR platform will consist of speech recognition, text-to-speech, VUI technology such as VoiceXML, and call termination via SIP or telephony hardware.

Answer 1

I have successfully tried Asterisk with Lumenvox for IVR speech recognition. Asterisk is very flexible when it comes to IVR, and not just that. It also supports a wide range of VoIP protocols (SIP, H323, IAX ...), as well as classic telephony (T1, E1, FXO, FXS, etc.) using interface boards from Digium and other suppliers (Sangoma, Rhino , etc). You can find more information about Asterisk at http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk

Asterisk is an open source software program that runs primarily on Linux. http://www.asterisk.org/

Lumenvox speech engine is a commercial speech recognition solution http://www.lumenvox.com/

Digium, Sangoma and Rhino are phone card manufacturers that are compatible with Asterisk. http://www.digium.com/ http://www.sangoma.com/ http://www.rhinoequipment.com/

Answer 2

Try Envox Studio 7 at envox.com

Answer 3

I believe that Nuance (recently merged with VoiceGenie) is a leading IVR platform with significantly greater traction in the industry than Microsoft Speech Server. You can read about this wiki article .

I'm not sure what to say about it without sound, like a salesman, but I worked with him for several years and enjoyed it. At that time, my company was evaluating Microsoft's offer, but I did not consider it mature enough to consider moving from a Nuance / VoiceGenie product.

Answer 4

From a commercial point of view, you can check out Genesys . Comparatively, I’m not sure how it opposes other commercial solutions, but my company has been operating successfully and successfully since 2005. Although I mainly work on the IVR part of the implementation, the system is usually very stable and relatively easy to maintain.

Answer 5

I'm not a voice engineer, but our SME is absolutely in love with Pactolus products. I watched him go through several years of pain with other products, and now he is very, very happy with the Pactolus solutions he built.

Answer 6

Dialogic and Gridborg (Uniqall) have solid artists.

Answer 7

Depends on whether you are in the self-service market or in the routing market of the Call Center head office.

For stand-alone applications, you can try Genesys Stack. They have a good combination of solutions with a bunch of BYOB options for your own plugins. Works well for high volume transactions based on financial services.

If you focus on the call center and have parts of the Cisco stack, you can try out their IPCC solution, which works well with a dummy-type user interface screen.

Answer 8

I used Voxeo for a while. It's great. They have amazing technical support and a fully functioning two-line demo account. They have very good debugging tools and free support, even if you have a free account. All their employees know and understand VoiceXML. Highly recommended.

Answer 9

There are several major players that I have watched or worked with:

Voxeo . Earlier versions used Nuance ASR, but I believe that now they use their own. Uses VoiceXML and CCXML to manage calls. They become expensive as they expand, but a development license (2 ports) is free.

Loquendo : I just list it because: a) I did it, and b) they have the best TTS engine I've ever heard. Seriously worth the demo to hear the quality.

Nuance Voice Platform (NVP) . I work with this almost daily. The nuance is by far the most powerful ASR on the market, but it comes at a great price. If you need to ask about the price, then do not worry about falling in love with the quality of the engine. It uses a slightly improved version of VoiceXML.

Microsoft Speech Server You already know that, of course. The blast for the dollar is a great platform. VoiceXML support is borderline (limited control over the engine from VXML properties), but if you want to use Workflows, you can do whatever you want. ASR is good, although it has almost no accuracy with large or complex grammars such as Nuance. This is currently my preferred platform for most applications. And, like Voxeo, the developer license is free.

Answer 10

I would recommend Katalina 'VoiceGuide' - a Windows-based CTI, IVR and reasonably priced dialing system, supporting both traditional POTS / ISDN and VoIP calling cards. see: www.voiceguide.com

Answer 11

We are currently creating an ivr video and have tried a bunch of platforms.

• Genesys is one of the few that supports video. I am not happy with this platform due to poor video support, cumborsome web management and total.
• Voxpilot is also one that supports video and is still better than Genesys. There is a free trial version that you can download, along with good VoiceXML examples that demonstrate the capabilities of IVR video.

• Voxeo - just demonstrated it, works only for IVR (no IVVR, like genesys and voxpilot)

• Nuance - ASR and TTS, which are pretty nice

• Speechwork and Scansoft . I think they merged (not very sure). It is a decent TTS and ASR server.

• Asterisk - can perform IVR and IVVR with some extensions, but we use it to manage calls. Great software.

I did not find a good IVVR platform that satisfies all our requirements.

Answer 12

You can check out Asterisk for an open source solution.

Answer 13

I previously used Telesage to run hundreds of thousands of interactive polls. This is decent software, and our support was good, but their system was not designed for our work.

We played with an asterisk.

For my next project, I intend to use the hosted Twilio ( http://www.twilio.com/ )

Answer 14

Try Envox. Even a newborn baby can develop IVR applications with it.

Answer 15

At my place of work, we used Genesys, but we changed it to Nortel for CTI and TAPI and IBM WebSphere Voice Response for users. I have not developed IVR material for other platforms, so I can’t say whether it’s better than others, but I can say that our IVR receives a ton of calls and it is durable.