How to add speech recognition to your call treatments (IVR)

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When you're building a call treatment for your Invoca campaign you might want to use a call treatment option that requires input from your customer — such as asking a question. In these situations, Invoca can recognize spoken responses from your customers, so they can navigate your call treatment menus just by talking.

For example, with this option enabled, you could create an "Ask a Question" node prompting your caller:

"For sales, say 'sales' or press 1. For customer service, say 'customer service' or press 2."

Your caller would have the option of saying either the word "sales" or pressing the 1 key on their phone to navigate to your sales call center.
 

Using speech recognition in your Invoca call treatments

If it isn't already, first you'll need to get speech recognition enabled in your Invoca account. To do so, click the Contact Support button at the bottom of this article to get in touch with our friendly Customer Success team and request this feature.

Once it's enabled, follow our guide How to understand, build, and edit a call treatment for your Invoca campaign and check the "Enable Speech Recognition" checkbox. This will add the option of speech recognition in your call treatment for all of the following node types:
 

• Ask for number input
• Ask a question
• Ask a series of questions
• Ask a yes or no question

 
When you add an "Ask a question" or "Ask a series of questions" node with speech recognition enabled, you'll see a text box labeled "Verbal Response" next to each input branch. Enter the word or short phrase you want Invoca to recognize in that text box, and Invoca will recognize when your caller says that word, and continue through your call treatment accordingly.

If you add an "Ask for number input" or "Ask a yes or no question" node, you won't have to take any extra steps — your Invoca account will already know the type of response from your caller that it's looking for!

When you're done, be sure to test your new call treatment extensively. If you want to use speech recognition on proper nouns or other words outside of common usage, you may need to spell them phonetically.

Additionally, if you're editing your call treatment to add or remove speech recognition, you may need to reconfigure any named IVR keypress Signals  you've set up for that call treatment option.
 

Related:
• How to understand, build, and edit a call treatment for your Invoca campaign 
• How to track your callers' IVR keypresses using Signals 
• Voice Signal - Evaluation and Reporting