A lot has been going on in the interactive voice response (IVR) space. From new releases to the latest trends and insights, this is where you’ll find all of the most interesting IVR-related news of the week!

This week, the Fuel Card Group, one of today’s largest independent fuel card agents, joined Liquid Voice to deploy the company’s IVR system to communicate with its new mileage collection application, back-end databases and existing Mitel (News - Alert)-based PABX, TMCnet reported. This new deployment ensures secure authentication, as well as captures driver, mileage and vehicle data, which it easily and directly enters into the service through a registered mobile phone.

“We regularly sample customers’ views and it was suggested to us that a secure yet simple to use system to allow drivers to enter mileage details via a normal phone would be a real time-saver,” said James Lister, head of IT at the Fuel Card Group. “We already have an online system but, for a busy driver out on the road, the most efficient way is to use a mobile telephone and the numbered keypad.”

Also this week, Al Jazeera English, an international news channel, revealed that it will be integrating IVR technology to cover upcoming political elections. The organization has deployed IVR for similar purposes in the past, specifically in Kenya, where a wide array of technologies were relied on, TMCnet reported. The reason for investing in IVR is reportedly “to create an additional interface to connect feature phones to the Web,” which Kenya Voices originally stated in a report.

"Al Jazeera Voices is an audio system that allows audiences to listen to, interact with and create citizen reports for Al Jazeera via low-end handsets, without any need for a data plan,” explained the Project Manager of Al Jazeera Voices, Cynara Vetch.

Wrapping up this week is news revolving around startups – specifically in the voice recognition space. First it was iSpeech, a startup providing free text-to-speech and speech recognition software – who boasted Evernote (News - Alert) as one of its first customers. Now this week, heavy hitter Google has invested in a startup that grew out of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, or U of T.

The start-up – DNNresearch Inc. – was founded by University Professor Geoffrey Hinton along with two of his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, who are working to improve object and speech recognition. Now, the company has truly taken off after being acquired by Google (News - Alert) – currently one of the biggest players in the industry. To learn more about this exciting announcement, click here for the report in full.

That’s going to do it this week for the latest news in the IVR space. To see what’s new next week, be sure to check back in same time, same place – only here at TMCnet.