This commercial was released in 1971 but touchtone (DTMF) was originally invented in 1941. That was 70 years ago! If your voice application is still using touchtone for user input, don’t you think it’s time to enter the 21st century?

Tropo offers speech recognition in 24 languages by default on every prompt allowing callers to use either touchtone or their voice to answer prompts during the call. We support four forms of speech recognition grammars include:

1. Simple Grammars – Tropo’s comma delimited grammar strings
2. GrXML – Speech Recognition Grammar Specification Version 1.0
3. JSGF – Java Speech Grammar Format or the JSpeech Grammar Format (in a W3C Note)
4. ABNF – Augmented BNF (Backus Normal Form)

Using Tropo’s simple grammars are incredibly, well, simple. Here is what an auto-attendant’s dial directory prompt would look like using Tropo’s simple speech recognition grammar.

ask "Welcome to the Tropo company directory.  Who are you trying to reach?", {
    :choices => "department(support, engineering, sales), person(chris, jason, adam)",
    :onChoice => lambda { |event| 
        say("You said " + event.choice.interpretation + ", which is a " + event.value)    
    }
}

From here you could also transfer the call to the department or person’s phone number or SIP address by substituting the onChoice say prompt with the following logic:

say "Please wait while we transfer your call. Press star to cancel the transfer."
transfer ["+14075550100","sip:12345678912@221.122.54.86"], {
    :playvalue => "http://www.phono.com/audio/holdmusic.mp3",
    :terminator => "*",
    :onTimeout => lambda { |event|
        say "Sorry, but nobody answered"}
}

The possibilities of developing new voice apps using speech recognition are endless! For one, your customers will have a better user experience (UX) by not having to press buttons on the phone. Secondly, apps such as language translater applications and personal assistant applications are now possible.

We want to be your speech recognition and cloud communications partner.

Related posts:

1. Talking to the Cloud: Build Speech Recognition Applications with Tropo
2. ASR-as-a-Service
3. Speech-Driven Phone Applications in the Cloud
4. Powerful Speech-Driven Tropo Applications
5. Speech Enabling Open311

Tags: asr, autoattendant, dtmf, speech recognition, touchtone

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