Mobile News

Because voice telephony remains the most widely used telecom service, the use of audio and speech can be a positive differentiator for alternative dialogues in a mobile campaign.

Speech and audio can be brought into mobile marketing campaign dialogues through the use of IVR technology. IVR is a telephony technology in which someone uses a touchtone telephone to interact with an application to acquire information or supply data. For example, banks use IVR systems so that their customers can receive up-to-date account information via a voice menu that can be navigated by pressing the phone’s keys. The user’s interaction with the application is predetermined by what the IVR system will allow the user access to–this is referred to as “call flow”. Call flow implementations are usually platform-dependent and performed by IVR programmers. Voice recognition technology has been added to IVR products to allow user interaction by recognizing a finite number of audio commands.

IVR technology is also used to gather information, as in the case of telephone surveys in which the user is prompted to answer questions by pushing the numbers on a touchtone telephone.

The decision to use voice via IVR technology in a mobile marketing campaign requires identifying the IVR partner company that will develop the call flow, host and manage the telephony equipment. The mobile marketing service provider can then focus on two aspects:

- the creation of audio content to be played by the IVR servers to subscribers

- interconnection of the mobile marketing application with the IVR for inbound or outbound calls.

When making use of IVR servers to offer pre-recorded content in a mobile campaign, the bit and sampling rates must be determined. This information can only be found in the manuals for the given IVR equipment. Manuals contain lists of accepted formats. This information is provided by the IVR administrator. IVR systems can usually accept a wide range of formats and/or bit or sampling rate combinations. These combinations have an impact on the sound quality and are selected depending on the application and target audience.

In terms of user interaction through an IVR, the mode of communication can range from minimal natural language, consisting perhaps of only a small set of words such as the digits 0-9 and the words “yes” and “no”, through to large vocabulary systems supporting relatively freeform speech input.

For small sets of words, touchtone or dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) is commonly used in mobile campaigns to transmit user selections (the digits 0-9 and the characters A, B, C, D, * and #) from an audio menu with audible tones from the handset to an IVR server. The tones are generated from two audio sources selected from a four-by-four matrix.

Spoken dialogue systems enable users to interact with complex computer applications in a natural way using speech. Current IVR systems restrict users in what they can say and how they can say it to a limited dictionary. This makes the use of voice recognition for registration purposes practically impossible due to the large variations in pronunciation of first names and last names in European languages.

The integration of IVR systems with a mobile marketing application is the other important aspect of using voice in a dialogue. The IVR host is usually not co-located with the mobile marketing system and some form of data exchange needs to take place across public infrastructure, i.e. the Internet. The direction of the exchange depends on the interaction. For outbound calls placed by the mobile marketing application (e.g. audio greetings) the IVR must listen for requests with at least a mobile number and a particular ID of the prompt (i.e. audio file) to play. For inbound calls, the IVR system initiates the communication and passes at least the mobile number of the consumer who called. The touchtone sequence is usually passed along with the number. The choice of the protocol to use for the communication will depend on the number of calls received by the IVR or requests sent by the mobile marketing application.

In summary, the relevance for mobile marketing campaigns of voice recognition technology is threefold:

- the creation of audio content–take into account the sound characteristics of the audio content you plan to serve over the IVR together with your partner

- the creation of the call flow–design simple call flows and request the help of your partner if this is a new topic for you

- the integration with the mobile marketing service-take into account the volumes and delays between the voice front-end and the mobile marketing back-end service. Choose with your IVR partner the appropriate protocols for maximum resilience of the service.