In the open source telecom community, you will often hear the term IVR used to describe an automated attendant. However, in the telecom industry, an IVR is distinct from an auto attendant. For this reason, when you are talking to somebody about any sort of telecom menu, you should ensure that you are talking about the same thing. To a telecom professional, the term IVR implies a relatively complex and involved development effort (and subsequent costs), whereas an automated attendant is a simple and inexpensive thing that is common to most PBXs.

In this chapter we talk about building an automated attendant. In Chapter 17, Interactive Voice Response we will discuss IVR.^[134]