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Overview

The speech-enabled IVR bots allow your callers to converse in a natural language and avoid the hassle of navigating through long and complicated key-press IVR menus.

The traditional IVRs identify the purpose of a call based on the customer's phone key input and routes the call to the correct team or agent. However, the speech IVR bot, powered by Freddy, uses speech recognition to understand a customer's voice using intents and gives human-like responses.


What are Intents?

Intents are common phrases or words that a customer speaks during a call. The speech IVR bot understands the purpose of a call using these intents. With speech IVR bot, route your inbound calls intelligently and help your customers have a better call experience.


What is a speech IVR Bot?

The speech IVR bot consists of intents and phrases that customers say during a call. Additionally, you can train the bot to recognize the intents based on customer's voice input. 


For example, if you have a travel booking customer service, you can create intents such as flight booking, flight cancelation, flight status, etc. For each intent, you can add relevant phrases that customers may give as voice input; for example, for flight booking, the relevant phrases you can add are "book my tickets" or "buy a flight ticket." Based on these intents and phrases, you can configure relevant actions within the speech IVR call flow.


The bot is configured within the speech-enabled IVR call flow and responds based on the call flow rules set up. For more information, see Training and Managing Your Speech IVR Bot.


How does Speech-enabled IVR work?

The speech IVR bot is initiated when a customer calls a Freshcaller phone number to which you assigned the speech-enabled IVR call flow. If the bot understands the customer's words or phrases, it associates the words to the intent and routes the call based on the call flow set up. However, if the bot does not understand the words or the customer did not give a valid input, it routes the call according to the call flow setup.


User/Role Requirements:

To set up speech-enabled IVR, you must have admin or account admin permissions.

Setting Up Speech Enabled IVR Call Flow

The speech-enabled IVR call flow helps you take the right actions based on the intents and other routing rules.

  1. Log in to your Freshcaller account as an admin user.
  2. Navigate to Admin > Call Flow > New Speech Enabled IVR and fill the form. Check the following steps.
  3. Speech Enabled IVR Name: Enter a name for the speech-enabled IVR call flow.
  4. Play Message: Select a message to initiate the speech IVR flow. Freschaller provides four default voice messages. You can choose to select one or create a customized message.
  5. Speech Bot Setup: Select or create the speech IVR bot. By default, you will have a speech IVR bot with two intents. You can select the default bot or create a new bot.
  6. To create a new bot, click on the Speech Bot drop-down and enter a name in the Search/Create Bot field that appears, and then click on the Create link. For detailed instructions, see Training and Managing Your Speech IVR Bot.
  7. Manage Intents: Click this option to add or manage intents for the speech bot selected/created in the previous step.
    When you click on this option, the Speech Bot page opens. Alternatively, you can also bulk upload a file with multiple intents.
  8. IVR Setup: Select the intents from the configured speech bot and choose relevant actions for each intent (see step 10). To understand how a customer's voice input is identified and related to intents, check Training and Managing Your Speech IVR Bot.
  9. To add a new intent, click on Add New Intent.
  10. Routing Rules: The routing rules let you configure how the bot should respond to a particular rule. The speech-enabled IVR call flow has the following rules:
    • If customer did not give a valid input: Select the action to take when a customer provides an invalid voice IVR option or does not say anything. See step 11 for the list of fallback actions.
      Additionally, for this rule, select the Play Message to play when a customer gives an invalid input. For example, you can create an invalid input message which says, "You have given us an invalid voice option. Please give a valid input".
      Also, enter the number of times you want to play the invalid input message and select the corresponding action to be taken after the n number of repeats:
    • If bot did not respond: Select the action to take if the bot fails to respond to a customer's question. See step 11 for the list of fallback actions 
  11. For each routing rule in step 9 or intents in step 8, select the relevant fallback action to perform. For example, if the bot did not understand, send to IVR or if the intent is Travel Booking, send to Call Queue. The actions available are:
    • Send to Voicemail: Select this to send the customer to the voicemail and subsequently select the voicemail message from the list or create a new message.
    • Send to Call Queue: Select this to send the customer to a call queue and subsequently select the relevant call queue name from the list or create a new call queue.
    • Send to IVR menu: Select this to send the caller to an IVR menu and subsequently select the IVR queue name from the list or create a new IVR menu.
    • Hangup: Select this to hang up. Select the hangup message from the list or create a new hangup message.
  12. Click Save.


Note: Finally, to initiate the speech-enabled IVR, map this workflow to any phone number in your account. 

Learn More

Training and Managing Your Speech IVR Bot