It strikes me as odd that IVR technology has been used exclusively for business purposes. Here at Plum, we’ve worked on applications that were intended for entertainment purposes, but none of those apps were games. With the explosion of mobile gaming, you’d think there’d be more games that could be played not on your phone but through your phone.
The few IVR games I’ve seen fall into a couple camps. The first type shoehorns a game that’s better served via a visual medium into something over the phone. IVR blackjack is an example of this. It works okay because there aren’t that many cards to keep track of but it’s still pushing the limits of what’s reasonable over a phone (imagine trying to play Texas Hold’em over the phone.) Trivia games are another type of game that have made it onto the phone. While trivia does, in fact, translate well into a phone application, they’re not really games per se. They’re more like a survey. There’s no gameplay or strategy involved.
The problem here is that phone games have been derivative of games better suited for another medium. We might be better off considering what VoiceXML IVRs are actually good at. The two compelling capabilities of a good IVR platform are speech recognition and data integration. Unfortunately the only thing I can come up with, given those two features, is a game where you’d learn incantations that you’d have to speak into your phone which could be used to trigger events in the real world. Imagine Ali Baba saying “open sesame” into his cell phone to automatically open his garage door: the IVR would listen for “open sesame” as well as a set of other possible incantations (e.g. “close sesame”, “presto change-o”, “abracadabra”) and, upon recognizing the phrase, makes a call to a web service running on a web server with X-10 controls which would, in turn, open the garage door.
That’s a bit more of a toy than a game though, but I think there’s some kernel of a game in there.
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