The IVR space has been a busy one over the last several months, and certain players in the voice technology arena have made significant contributions to the industry as a whole with developments in speech processing, voice recognition, and other related improvements. Plum Voice was not to be left out of the exciting developments in IVR, and as a well known, popular IVR provider, it left its own mark on the IVR industry in 2011.

In an interview with Scott Wilson, vice president of marketing and sales for Plum Voice, I got some more details on how Plum Voice made its own progress, and what it is looking forward to in 2012. Wilson noted that the company, “unveiled a new product, added new features to existing products and increased our hosted IVR infrastructure.”

 More specifically, Plum’s new Floodlight product “is the first truly multi-modal, rapid-application-development survey tool—a non-technical, write-once and deploy-anywhere platform for web, phone, mobile devices and Facebook (News - Alert),” Wilson told me.  

In the enterprise arena, Plum’s IVR products got an extra boost this year with enhanced features including transcription for open-ended questions, advanced question-verification, randomized answers and questions, in addition to tighter integration with Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert).

 “We also increased our telecommunications, web and database cloud infrastructure for even greater capacity and redundancy, as well as better failover and disaster recovery services for our customers,” mentioned Wilson.

No industry is without its forecasted challenges for the New Year, and the IVR space falls in step with them in its own right. The challenges facing the IVR industry focus on the customer-centric concerns that involve the latest developments in cloud computing. Many IVR users are considering moving their systems to the cloud, and Plum Voice is ready to assist in this capacity.

 Wilson mentioned, “One challenge will be helping prospective customers transition from a proprietary premise-based solution to an open-hosted IVR environment. A main part of that will be helping companies get comfortable putting their voice applications in the cloud.  We need to show why our infrastructure is secure, educate potential customers on how hosted IVR can lower costs and help developers learn VoiceXML (News - Alert).”

 As those of us who watch the voice technology industries with a keen eye expect, the development of speech applications will be a huge one in 2012. Wilson agreed, “Companies will continue to move from premise-based solutions to hosted IVR platforms that support open standards and speech recognition.” With automation as the norm these days, automated telephony solutions and applications

The market will continue to expand with more powerful speech applications driving better automated telephony applications. Wilson noted that the continued improvements in SIP technology have aided Plum in making enhancements to its own support technology offerings “in more than 65 countries.”

Stay tuned to the IVR community to see all the forthcoming developments in 2012.

Juliana Kenny graduated from the University of Connecticut with a double degree in English and French. After managing a small company for two years, she joined TMC (News - Alert) as a Web Editor for TMCnet. Juliana currently focuses on the call center and CRM industries, but she also writes about cloud telephony and network gear including softswitches.

Edited by Jamie Epstein