System information

CHAPTER 17
Interactive Voice Response
One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a
Cheshire cat in a tree. “Which road do I take?”
she asked.
“Where do you want to go?” was his response.
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”
—Lewis Carroll
In this chapter we will talk about IVR. If what you want is an automated attendant, we
have written a chapter for that as well (Chapter 15). The term IVR is often misused to
refer to an automated attendant, but the two are very different things.
*
What Is IVR?
The purpose of an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system is to take input from a
caller, perform an action based on that input (commonly, looking up data in an external
system such as a database), and return a result to the caller.
†
Traditionally, IVR systems
have been complex, expensive, and annoying to implement. Asterisk changes all that.
Asterisk blurs the lines between traditional PBXs and IVR systems. The
power and flexibility of the Asterisk dialplan results in a system where
nearly every extension could be considered an IVR in the traditional
sense of the term.
* We suspect this is because “IVR” is much easier to say than “automated attendant.”
† In contrast to an auto attendant, the purpose of which is to route calls.
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