Speech To Text and IVR testing

Opale Systems   Friday, 16th February 2024

IVR (Interactive Voice Recorder)

An IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system is a voice-based call management solution that interacts with users through specific audio prompts or keypad inputs (sending DTMF tones). You’ve likely encountered an IVR when contacting your insurance company, bank, or receiving calls with automated welcome messages.

Service centers widely use IVRs to efficiently route customer requests to the appropriate department or business unit.

With Opale Systems solutions, you can:

• Monitor IVR availability and overall navigation duration from a true customer perspective.
• Simplify and accelerate scenario validation, reducing both implementation time and operational costs when introducing new IVR paths.

Challenges

Most companies validate IVR tree navigation using real human testers, which results in significant costs in both time and human resources every time the IVR configuration changes.

With MultiDSLA, Opale Systems enables you to automate the IVR validation process, reducing manual effort and accelerating deployment cycles.

Targets

You will be interested in Opale Systems solutions if you are:

• An IVR application server provider.
• A call center organization, regardless of whether you use on-premise or cloud-based solutions.
• A cloud-based contact center service provider.
• A telecom operator looking to optimize and monitor IVR and voice services.

What do you need ?

MultiDSLA

MultiDSLA is the central platform that drives nodes to place call, receive calls, send audio patterns, perform speech quality measurement on audio pattern, send tones and frequencies.
Nodes are acting like Humans with the capability to perform 24/7 tests with flexibility and scalability.

Flexibility : quickly adapt your test scenarios and produce new reports
Scalability : deploy nodes everywhere.

Nodes are software or hardware:

• VPP: is the reference softphone that embed various codec and all SIP messaging recording.
• DSLA: is a POTS line termination (to be connected as an analog phone) or balanced termination to be connected on a mobile, a laptop…

Example of Opale Systems implementation

Typical use case

In this example, the customer wants to reach the service department:

• The customer dials a phone number (typically a dedicated or unique number);
• A welcome message is received upon call connection;
• The customer is then invited to navigate into the IVR menu to be directed to the appropriate service department;
• Depending on service availability, the system provides an estimated waiting time and places the customer on hold.

In some cases, the system plays a closing message, informing customers they will be contacted later or should call back at a later time due to agent unavailability.

How to emulate end users?

VPP emulates customers as well as employees.
VPP can place, receive calls, play DTMF, record messages, perform Speech Quality measurements, etc.

• VPP1 emulates the customer.
• VPP2 and 3 can emulate the customer on different points of the first DC that handles unique phone baring.
• VPP4 and 5 can place calls towards VPP6 through the SBC and/or IVR.
• VPP6 emulates the employee.

The described scenario represents a specific use case that covers the entire transmission chain, from customer emulation at various points along the transmission path to the emulation of the agent.

In the case of cloud-based contact center solutions, deploying a VPP (Virtual Probe Point) within data centers is generally not expected unless the cloud-based service provider offers dedicated services to call centers.

Working with speech recognition

MultiDSLA is using the Speech to text feature.
Speech recognition is part of a specific control event.
This control event is named “record.”

Within the tasklist:

• we play DTMF
• then we start recording what the node is receiving
• then we wait for an expected audio sample
• the audio recording is stopped, and a speech-to-text transcription is performed to analyze the captured content.

Going to advanced tasklist generation or how to perform some conditional tests is not part of this document.
You can contact us if you are interested in IVR or CC testing with more features like conditional tests an reports.

Conclusion

Moreover, on production networks, you can perform 24/7 service availability and quality measurements, enriching your KPIs with new and insightful metrics such as:

• Call Access Time (CAT): Measures the time from initial call setup, through IVR navigation, to the point of reaching an employee network. This can be compared against service-level metrics (e.g., time for an agent to take a call) to precisely identify delays in both call handling and call transmission.
• Tree Scenario Time: Captures the total time required to follow a specific IVR scenario, providing insights into IVR efficiency and user experience.
• Call Global Quality: Measures end-to-end audio quality from both the customer’s and the agent’s perspectives, ensuring high service standards throughout the communication chain.

MultiDSLA can be used across both pre-production environments—to validate IVR trees or server updates—and in production environments to continuously monitor subscriber experiences and service provider performance.