IVR Deconstructed

Hats off to the Packers for winning their 4th Super Bowl. The Steelers never quite managed to gain the lead, but the game was fairly tight and exciting all the way up until the 4th quarter when the Packers clinched the win.  While the game wasn’t a huge nail biter, it certainly entertained. I am an avid football fan, but I additionally tuned in to check out the commercials.  While there were several very funny offerings (the Doritos dog, the inappropriate email) one struck me as particularly relevant: the Chevy Cruze commercial, which can be viewed here.  The commercial involves a young man awkwardly ending a date.  As he embarks on his commute home from the outing, he utilizes functionality integrated into his vehicle’s operating system to check his Facebook feed.  He finds out that his recent date has updated her Facebook feed, and has in fact declared their just-finished date the “best ever”.  While this copy was clearly designed to elicit a smile, I couldn’t help noticing that Chevy has incorporated some fairly nuanced, state-of-the-art interactive voice response technology.  The system operating on the Chevy Cruze in the commercial is heavily reliant on an in-car IVR system.  The system appears to integrate with the Facebook database and the user’s specified news feed to deliver hands free, spoken updates.  This is a hands free solution that allows users to interface with technology while on the go and in their vehicles.  It is also exciting to think that if Chevy was able to integrate Facebook, what others systems could they automate within this IVR interface? I was quite impressed that this idea, once merely a Facebook user’s dream, had come to fruition so intuitively!

Have you ever wanted to hear a game in another city while you’re stuck in traffic?  Perhaps you wish you could listen to your favorite music but don’t have satellite radio.  Now you can access a vast amount of media, sports, and music content over the phone with Plum’s IVR Shoutcast and streaming radio mashup.  The Plum platform supports MP3 streaming so our IVR systems can tie directly into a Shoutcast or local radio streams.  Shoutcast offers 43,462 free Internet radio stations so anyone can access radio content from their favorite talk show host, musician or music from any genre.  For anyone that wants to set up shoutcast or streaming radio over the phone please visit Plum’s github page in the next several days.  We’ll post the VoiceXML source code there shortly.