IVR Deconstructed

TTS, ASR, VXML, IVR…these terms may seem a bit confusing at times, but fear not. I will be explaining one of these terms to you today.

ASR:

ASR stands for Automatic Speech Recognition. It represents a collection of technologies required for an IVR system to listen for specific words and phrases, detect the speech from within an audio sample, analyze the speech relative to what is being listened for, and provide the final text representing what the ASR system believes was uttered.

IVR-specific implementations of ASR do grammar-driven recognition. The ASR engine must be informed of the specific utterances that it is likely to hear. The list of utterances may number in the tens of thousands (with names or cities, for instance) but this list must nonetheless be finite. The grammar formats supported by the Plum Voice IVR Platform are SRGS and JSGF.

Please keep the following in mind for our US IVR production hosting systems:

“For speech recognition, we currently only offer American English speech recogition, Spanish speech recognition, French-Canadian speech recognition for hosting. If you are interested in any other speech recognition languages, please contact your sales representative.”

For our UK IVR production hosting systems:

“For speech recognition, we currently only offer American English speech recogition and British English speech recognition for hosting. If you are interested in any other speech recognition languages, please contact your sales representative.”

Please keep in mind that ASR is not the same thing as TTS (text-to-speech), which will be covered in a future blog post.