Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Comes of Age

Abstract

While interactive voice response (IVR) systems were rapidly making their way into the workplace, speech scientists were working hard to improve the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to foster their acceptance among potential customers. In the last five years, great strides have been made in this regard, and the commercial use ASR is on the rise. The purpose of this panel is to explore the impact that ASR is (or is not) having on the design of IVR systems that were envisioned originally to operate solely via touch-tone input.