You may have noticed we are not too interested in the standard format for a web site. As soon as we figure out what professional models and IVR's have to do with each other we will load the site up with photos.
Custom IVR applications using Visual Studio
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Here are some articles we have written on topic.
Phone vendor selection
has become a wide open race due to VoIP. You can now literally download a VoIP phone switch from the Internet. Oh, and for free. Gosh, that sounds great but be aware your service relationship is with a very busy person, you.
Obviously we are not at the point where a freeware VoIP phone switch is main stream, but we are at the point where the number of phone system vendors is no longer limited to a dozen territory controlled resellers of the same ol' big iron stuff that once you buy into you are stuck with their proprietary world of expensive upgrades and so-so service.
The big PBX of old has been replaced with a PC. This means that the barrier to entry for a new VoIP vendor is very low. Competition is immense so prices are low, hurray! Even the huge companies have had to drop prices. Even small companies don't have to agonize over the years of amortization of their PXB anymore.
Now for the down side. How do you choose when there are so many competitors and you have never heard of any of them? At least in the old days you could buy from one of the monster vendors and be confident you were not going to get smirked at in the Monday morning meeting. "Jim's Computers and Phone Systems," does not bring with it the same comfort that you get from buying AT&T or IBM. Ah but our buddy Jim might be just what you need.
Forget technology, forget compatibility. Standard are everywhere and from the big boys to the little boys there is a great call to march in a straight line. If you buy a VoIP product these days, you will hear terms like SIP, RTP, and H.323. Machines work together so much better than they ever did before you are in good shape with a VoIP PBX.
So, now to decide you must go back to the basics. Remember, the phone system along with the internet, are your connections to the world. Those connections are the most important technology in your office and most often they are together in one VoIP box. Don't pick the box, pick the vendor.
Get referrals from other businesses in your area. If you have no friends in business at all, try the Better Business Bureau. Find a company that others have had good luck with. And by good luck I mean trouble with their phone systems with quick response and resolution. A reference for a VoIP phone vendor that installed a system and was never needed again is a useless referral.
Once you have your vendor in your sights have them propose a system for you. Ask them to add you to their customer list prior to purchase. Then research the proposal on the net. Make sure people are speaking well of the unit they are offering. Make sure the pricing is within 20% of what other people are paying. Do not quibble over a small variance in price. Pay it like you pay your fire insurance. Gladly and with confidence you are protected.
Now, at 2 am contact them. Tell them you have an outage. If you can contact someone, they know who you are and are ready to serve you; these are probably the lifelong voip phone buddies you are looking for. If not, move on. Repeat until success. Oh and always pay a good phone vendor on time. They are basically your business fire department.
Oh, if you need IVR or voice technology to work with your new VoIP PBX, you should contact us. We have the fireman hats and everything.
We can be reached at
bobw@charleskingconsulting.com or 734-448-2266
Does IVR still have a niche?
We all want speech recognition from the sci-fi movies. We hope for HAL9000 or the ships computer to anticipate what we want and give it to us with a perky optimism that only very friendly computers can muster. Unfortunately we have a couple of things still in the way.
First, we want it to work over the phone. This is the most common place speech recognition is deployed. Unfortunately the phone has two major obstacles, sound quality and an incumbent technology that works pretty good already.
I once did a demo for a custom of an IVR application. They were concerned that the check call their drivers would be placing would take too long. I had the customer start their watch and placed the call. Start to finish, 9 seconds including call setup. Try that on any speech recognition system. Also keep in mind that everyone knows how interactive voice response works. Most of them know if you mash the '0' key really hard you end up talking to someone and that at midnight there is no amount of '0' mashing that will get you that luxury.
Now for the other, give this a try. Call your friend and tell them to write down the name Brahieda Mebregehadoi. Offer to spell it letter by letter. Note how many mistakes and tries it takes to get it right. This is a friend who is used to your personal vocal patterns. Machines are not that good, and the phone lines are not that good. Try the same experiment face to face. You will experience a huge difference in accuracy. When phone lines are as good as being there, we may see speech recognition as good as being there. That is a while away.
Now there are a hand full of grammars that are just wonderful under speech recognition, given reasonable background noise conditions and fair weather. My favorites are date and time entry. The amount of hassle it is to enter a date or time in the DTMF world is one of the reasons the technology is up for replacement in the first place.
Another reason is that speech recognition systems learn. A speech recognition system put in place last year will not operate the same today as it did then. It learns what people are saying and can adapt, with a little help from a human now and again.
The bottom line is this. Do not jump to the speech recognition world to "improve" your customer experience unless you are sure it actually will. DTMF based interactive voice response systems can work better than speech recognition systems in many situations and we are fortunate to have either option available to us.
VB or Java?
It feels like I've just walked out of a cave after the bombs fell. I just spent the last five years completing an engineering degree while basically ignoring the software tool war. I am out now and here's how I see it.
Visual studio 6 code bases in VB and VC++ are still out there. Oh yes, waiting to be moved. Many have come over to the .NET side. Some have joined the Java rebellion. The empire has created a way to tame the Java savages by providing C#. Many have been enticed to join. Sadly for the VB stalwarts, many of their ranks have moved to C# as well. Ah, but C# is really a tool for the younger crowd. Long time experienced programmers know that the language is trivial and the code base is king. As long as VB is supported as a direct competitor to VC++ and VC#, it will remain strong.
For my experience porting a VC6 application to .NET, in this case 2005, I was forced to draw a line between my un-managed code and my new managed work. Many of my hardware libraries are not supported as managed code so I did need to dance on the head of this pin. To my surprise it just worked.
Then came the choice, VB vs. VC#. For me the decision was based on how many answers to questions I would find on the web sporting examples in my chosen language. It was a draw. I never found any question that didn't have clear examples in both. And to be honest, the two languages are so close it just wouldn't matter anyway.
Next it came down to preference. I have been programming in VB and C++ since they were created. So for me, I could not care either way. Back in the old days there was an advantage of compiled vs. run-time. With this out of the picture, it was again a draw.
The final criteria should have been first from the start. What would I rather show a customer or train a young programmer from another discipline? How hard will it be to teach to an Electrical, Mechanical, or Industrial Engineer? For this I chose VB. I have shown customers both and they seem to like the idea of VB better.
Why Dell?
This is no article of great philosophical import. Just an observation. Lots of companies use Dell. I mean a LOT of companies. The University of Michigan, standardized on Dell for almost everything. Honestly, that was good enough for me. Hope you weren't looking for too much more on the subject. I have never received a non working Dell machine. I have never had a customer tell me that Dell was not an exceptable choice. I have had customers tell me that non-Dell would not be exceptable. Nuff said.
Visual Voice
Anyone remember Visual Voice? Basically this was just a library written for Visual Basic that interfaced to a couple of types of Dialogic Cards. There were gobs of applications written in Visual Voice. Lot's of Developers specialize in replacing old unsupported Visual Voice applications with current technology equivalents. For many companies this is a great alternative to getting into fancier stuff. Minimal learning curve etc... Millions of programmers still out there etc. Oh, and did you know that Dialogic has a Voip product that is a quick compile away from compatibility to your stuff? Oh yes!