Microsoft Talks Up Speech Server 2004: Page 2 of 6

When it came to non-customer callers, the limited facilities of voicemail systems were exploited to interact with the caller as a simple answering machine for caller voice messaging, an auto-attendant to re-direct calls from the main business number to specific user extensions, and some really mickey-mouse ways to use a group of special mailboxes to emulate an application call flow with voice menus (mailbox greetings) and branching logic to other mailboxes. What voicemail could not do is directly access application databases; that required the power of IVR programming.

Your father's IVR also had problems with creating the speech prompts and responses, because it originally required laborious pre-recording with voice artists. God forbid a small script change was needed and the original person who did the recording was no longer available! Although having mixed voices is not a terrible thing, it could be "unnatural" and disconcerting to a caller.

Rescue

Everyone acknowledges the fact that speech recognition and text-to-speech have now become mature and cost-effective enough for practical use in controlling applications and informational content. This applies to both person-to-person "communication applications" (voice calls, messaging) and service applications, where speech is used for application input and/or output to end user contact devices, such as: