Chapter 17. Interactive Voice Response

Table of Contents

What Is IVR?
Components of an IVR
IVR Design Considerations
Do
Don’t
Asterisk Modules for Building IVRs
CURL
func_odbc
AGI
AMI
A Simple IVR Using CURL
Installing the cURL Module
The Dialplan
A Prompt-Recording Application
Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech
Text-to-Speech
Speech Recognition
Conclusion

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. “Which road do I take?” she asked.

“Where do you want to go?” was his response.

“I don’t know,” Alice answered.

“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”

Lewis Carroll

In this chapter we will talk about IVR. If what you want is an automated attendant, we have written a chapter for that as well (Chapter 15, The Automated Attendant). The term IVR is often misused to refer to an automated attendant, but the two are very different things.[150]



[150] We suspect this is because “IVR” is much easier to say than “automated attendant.”