He loves to talk to the customers, but it gets
too much sometimes! He has now come to us to find an alternative. He says, "How
about a computer answering the call and taking the order?"
Hmm, that's an interesting challenge! Let us explore and develop an interactive voice
response (IVR) system for Luigi in this chapter. Specifically, we will look at:
Setting up an interactive voice response platform
Playing pre-recorded audio and text to speech
Accepting keypad inputs
Accepting voice input and doing speech recognition
Performing dynamic calculations on input
Integrating with server-side scripting
Voice-driven systems bring a wealth of opportunities. Unlike a few years ago, it is
possible now to do complex speech recognition. If you had to build an interactive
voice based system earlier, you had to know arcane details about the hardware and
network you were deploying on. Now, with standards-based languages, the job is
much easier.
Let's get on and discover how easily we can build a sophisticated voice-driven
ordering system for Luigi.
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Interactive Voice
[ 158 ]
First, Some Basics
You wouldn't want to jump off a plane without parachute, right? So how can we get
to the implementation without knowing some fundamentals? The following figure
shows how a typical IVR application may function.
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