IVR Deconstructed

Indonesia. Chile. San Francisco. Tokyo. Richmond?  While scientists have tried to improve early warning systems for earthquakes worldwide, there are some areas of the globe where seismic activities are expected and prepared for.  Citizens living in cities and countries that along the San Andreas Fault or within the Pacific Ring of Fire know that they live in very active seismic zones and therefore expect a high frequency of earthquakes.

A 5.8 earthquake originating in Richmond, V.A. struck the East Coast yesterday and was felt by people in a dozen states.  According to Wikipedia, tremors were felt as far south as Ocala, Florida, as far north as Quebec City, Quebec, as far west as Illinois, and as far east as New Brunswick.  There have thus far been four aftershocks measuring in at 2.8, 2.2, 4.2 and 3.4 respectively.

Earthquakes are extremely rare in the eastern U.S., and many buildings were structurally unprepared to withstand an earthquake of that type of magnitude.  The earthquake caused panic in cities like Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and New York City, with many citizens initially confused as to what was happening.

In addition, the earthquake caused widespread disruption of air travel with flights delayed and halted at huge international airports like Dulles, JFK, Ronald Reagan and Philadelphia.  There is an estimated $100 million dollars worth of damage in the D.C. area, including structural damage to several national monuments.  Alarmed citizens trying to contact their friends and loved ones actually overwhelmed Verizon and AT&T networks causing both disruptions and outages.

According to the Washington Post, the word earthquake appeared in the status updates of three million users within 4 minutes of the start of the quake.  Twitter reported that users were sending up to 5,500 tweets per second.  Social media played a huge part in the aftermath reporting of the earthquake, allowing users to instantaneously update their friends and loved ones regarding their health and safety.  But what about before the earthquake?

An emergency alert system could be set up in all areas (not just those located along fault lines and areas of heightened seismic activity) and could utilize different types of technology to warn residents of potential upcoming danger.  Scientists typically only have a couple of minutes before an earthquake hits to alert individuals about potential upcoming dangers. Social media, in this case, might not be the best way to send an alert.

An interactive voice response (IVR) system would come in quite handy in this type of scenario.  An IVR system could dispatch outbound warning calls or send text messages to individuals indicating potential danger.  Many people have their phones both on and with them at all times, so they would get this alert fairly quickly.  They could then take the necessary precautions to keep themselves safe and sound, and could use the system afterwards to update people on their status as well!

Many of the millions of people accessing the Internet daily do so in order to log onto one or more social networking sites. Global social media usage has skyrocketed, with Nielsen estimating that the global average of time spent per person on social networking sites was nearly five and a half hours per month.

Understanding the demographics of social media use worldwide can help companies come up with branding strategies, target intended audiences and develop their product with certain countries and regions in mind. Social media is becoming a vital staple of technology, and even niche technologies like interactive voice response (IVR) are developing web APIs and database interfaces that can interface succinctly with social media. Understanding the user base is vital in determining where and how new product development and marketing take place.

Facebook is the number one social network in the world, followed by MySpace, Bebo and Friendster. All of these networks have international user bases, are multilingual and target users worldwide. The countries that have the largest Facebook user bases are the U.S., the UK, Turkey, France, Canada, Italy, Indonesia, Spain, Australia and the Philippines. Granted, these statistics are from March, but they paint a graphic portrait of social networking users. In addition, the 10 fastest-growing countries for Facebook use were Poland, Thailand, Portugal, South Africa, Taiwan, Romania, Germany, Malaysia, Indonesia and Iraq.

The above statistics can change weekly and even daily, but they show that Facebook, and by extension social networking, is becoming both popular and prevalent globally. The countries on this list are diverse culturally, socially and geographically. This widespread use indicates that social networking is becoming a global trend, not merely restricted to the United States or the English-speaking world.

An article in ReadWriteWeb just today reported that Twitter’s user base is much bigger outside the United States than it is nationally: It’s huge in Brazil, Japan and the Philippines, for example. It turns out Twitter’s pretty hot in the Spanish-speaking world too. More than 60% of Twitter users reside outside of the United States.

Twitter has launched services in a variety of different languages including but not limited to Italian, Spanish, Turkish, English, Korean, French, Russian, German, Japanese, Indonesian and Dutch. Twitter is capitalizing on its burgeoning international audience to expand the network. By making the social network available in a variety of languages, users worldwide can connect with their friends, colleagues and loved ones via increasingly unique forms of social media.

Social media has become an international phenomenon in a fairly short amount of time. While all of the above-mentioned networks launched originally in the U.S., they have quickly capitalized on the interest they have received from an international user base. The countries where social media’s user base is rapidly growing are unique in that they represent countries from all regions and continents.

Those in the tech industry, including companies like Plum that operate in the IVR sphere, should take note of the heightened international interest in social media and, by extension, technology. In order to be marketable and user-friendly on a large scale, companies should develop programs and technologies that are adaptable to many different languages and cultures.

Here at Plum we are frequently asked by our customers about integrating IVR with a pre-existing Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) system. Most of the time this is code for “we want screen pops.” For those of you unfamiliar with CTI and screen-pops, CTI is a family of technologies intended to improve the efficiency of a call center by seamlessly connecting telephony infrastructure with IT infrastructure. “Screen pops” are the piece of that puzzle that gets the most attention because it’s enormously useful–your call reps know who’s calling even before their phones ring.

So, not surprisingly, we wanted screen pops here at Plum as well. Not just for our support staff either. We implemented screen pops company-wide. Every time a customer calls, the person being called gets a screen pop identifying the caller, the company they work for, and other pertinent data. And unlike other commercial CTI systems, our screen pop system was free. We use AOL Instant Messenger for our screen pops.

Now to say it’s free is a little bit of a misnomer. Sure we didn’t pay a third party a dime for client software that would pop up a message window on pretty much any platform known to humankind. We had to, however, turn to our talented engineering staff to pull off this clever bit of code.

Here’s how it works. A caller calls into the Plum IVR autoattendant. The IVR, using the caller’s caller ID, does a database search to gather information about them. If that caller enters an extension to which they wish to be connected, the IVR, while transferring the call, also calls a subroutine that tells a special AIM client written in Python and running on Linux to send an instant message to the Plum employee being called.  This special AIM client will log itself into AIM and send the message to the Plum employee’s AIM account, and then log itself out. The Plum employee sees an IM pop up on their screen indicating that a customer is calling. He or she can answer the phone and immediately provide service to the customer without asking the caller who they are and why they’re calling. Time is saved, money is saved, and everyone’s happy.

So IBM has built a couple of microprocessors that mimic the human brain. You can read about it in the Tech sections of most newspapers. You may have to dig for it. It was bigger news yesterday.

That’s actually what I’m confused about. How is this not on the front page of every newspaper in the world all week long? And why aren’t people throwing around “The Birth of Artificial Intelligence” headlines everywhere? No one’s really mentioned A.I. at all.

But isn’t that what this is?

Only Gizmodo seems to think so.

“Yes people, this could be the day we all look back upon with sheer horror, as The Robots chase us from our houses and onto the streets,” they wrote yesterday.

But I had to search on Gizmodo’s website to find the article.

I mean, come on. For the last fifty years, computers have operated with their processing and memory separate. They’ve processed information one bit at a time, shuffling data back and forth between the processor and the memory.

The “thinking” computers we have today can predict possible behavior based on what’s gone on in the past (your smartphone predicting a text word for you). But it’s kid’s play.

The human brain is a parallel processor with memory and processing interconnected. We’re capable of infinitely more learning than a computer…for the moment.

IBM’s two new chips operate similarly to our brains—they have neurons and synapses and loads of parallel processing. Basically, each chip has a core with 256 neurons linked to synapses—one chip links to 262,144 programmable synapses (memory) while the other links to 65,536 learning synapses—and the chips work in parallel.

What they provide is a thinking computer that learns the same way we do—strengthening neuron connections as it learns.

“We aren’t there yet, but before long these chips will be able to rewire themselves on the fly,” IBM’s Dharmendra Modha told the New York Times.

Whoa.

The chips are slow at the moment, but they’ll get way faster—parallel processing generates a huge amount of computing power. And Modha told VentureBeat that IBM hopes to make a computer with 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, as powerful as the human brain (which has 10 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses).

At the same time, it’ll be smaller than the human brain and only use one kilowatt of power. (By comparison, IBM’s most powerful computer today sits in its own air-conditioned cabinet and takes two megawatts of power to run.)

Yet still no mention of A.I. and robots. Seriously? A supercomputer the size of a human brain? Who can’t imagine that sitting on top of a robot?

Well, I can. And I think this could be the poster boy for the term quiet revolution. We’ll see…in about ten years or so when these chips start showing up in our computers.

In 1811, music boxes were produced in Switzerland.  In November of 1877 Thomas Edison announced the creation of the phonograph.  The first jukebox was created in 1889.  The 8-track player became a prevalent feature option in a variety of automobiles in 1964.  Originally used for making voice recordings when it was invented in 1971, the cassette deck enabled high-quality music playback.

Compact disc players hit the market in 1982, giving users even higher-quality music playback.  The first MP3 player became available in the fall of 1997, allowing users to transport large amounts of music around with them remotely.  Napster, one of the first and most famous peer-to-peer file sharing networks became operational in June of 1999, before being shut down for copyright violations in July of 2001.

The first iPod was unveiled in 2001, changing the way the masses not only listened to, but experienced music.  Pandora Radio, an online music service that plays songs similar to the musical input by a user was launched in 2005, allowing people to freely listen to music in the genre of their choice.  Finally, Spotify was released in Stockholm, Sweden in 2008.  The service allows music streaming of ANY song within Spotify’s music catalogue of over 15 million tracks.  The service launched in the U.S. on July 14, 2011, and is only available via invitation or a payment plan.

How has this music revolution changed the way people find, consume and promote music?  What do these new state-of-the-art music services like Pandora and Spotify mean for the music industry as a whole?  Also, how can these programs interface with interactive voice response (IVR) systems to bring users the most complete music services possible?

As evidenced by the timeline above, the music industry has integrated heavily with technology, more rapidly during some periods than others, to improve the quality of music listeners can access, and the ease-of-use by which they can discover it.  As someone who grew up at the tail end of the “tech revolution” in music, I am rarely shocked when a unique service hits the market.

I was queued up to get a free Spotify invitation almost immediately when it hit the U.S. market.  The service is unreal.  Any track, any album, virtually any artist, is accessible to users within seconds of doing a search.  I was so sold on the product that I immediately purchased the service so that I could port music around offline and on my iPhone.  Spotify is the real deal.

Combined with Pandora, users could feasibly never purchase music again.  Users can use Pandora to find about new artists, songs and albums they’re interested in, and then use their Spotify accounts to explore these artists further.  Both services require users to pay to get the premium levels of service, so copyright violation is not an issue.

Spotify operates by securing licensing deals with many major music labels.  They were only able to release the service in the U.S. a little over a month ago because they were involved in years of contract negotiations and delays with major record companies.  The service is renowned for its library, allowing users access to about 15 millions tracks, with the library growing by 10,000 tracks per day according to some reports.  Spotify is available via both desktop and mobile versions, and paying users can listen to their chosen music virtually anywhere.

So how can IVR integrate with this revolutionary music service in order to allow everyone to listen to their chosen music on-the-go.  Users could call in, enter their Spotify account info, and listen to or preview songs, create playlists or purchase tracks all with the use of both voice recognition and DTMF-interpreting software.  Much like a Pandora API has been created for use with voice-web integration systems, an API that combined the functionalities of IVR and Spotify could be created as well.

Spotify is one of the most unique companies I have ever had the privilege of coming in contact with, and integration with IVR systems would only serve to improve this awesome service.