System and method for providing local interactive voice response services

摘要

A system and method for providing local interactive voice response (IVR) services is provided. A local computer system having associated telephony equipment and installed at a local facility (e.g., a retail store of a chain, etc.) receives telephone calls to the local facility. The local computer system generates IVR prompts locally, and is controlled by a central IVR server. Reduced bandwidth is required between the local computer system and the central IVR server since no voice traffic is communicated between the central IVR server and the local computer system.

主权项

1. A system for locally-generated interactive voice response, comprising:
a gateway at a local facility for receiving a telephone call from a caller; a processor at the facility for locally generating voice prompts for prompting the caller to provide information, and for generating a request relating to the information provided by the caller; a first communications link between the processor and a first server at a service provider remote from the local facility for transmitting the request to the first server; and a second communications link between the first server and a second server remote from the first server; wherein the first server receives the request over the first communications link, processes the request using an interactive voice response (IVR) application executing on the first server to generate a response, communicates information stored in the request to the second server over the second communications link, said information generated during an IVR session generated by the processor at the facility, and transmits the response to the local facility, the processor receiving the response and conveying the response to the caller using the gateway, and wherein the processor at the facility receives spoken information from the caller during the telephone call, digitizes the spoken information, and transmits the digitized spoken information to a speech recognition server remote from the processor, local facility, and the speech recognition server processes the digitized spoken information into textual information and transmits the textual information to the processor for subsequent use of the textual information by the processor.