The voicebots have arrived
"IVR" is dead, long live "voicebots". And about time too. What do you call an automated telephony application that uses some mix of speech recognition or keypad input, and text-to-speech or pre-recorded output? ("IVR" they say in the trade, but it sounds like a medical condition to everyone else. "Interactive Voice Response", the full version, manages to say very little at all, while "Speech Recognition System" is only the half of it.)
But I've now seen talk of "voicebots" in reference to everything from answering machines to sophisticated conversational systems. (The latest is an ongoing discussion at BoingBoing about a Sprint voice-bot with what looks like an amazingly flawed privacy policy [thanks Craig]).
Above all, I think the rise of the word, unprompted, from amongst grass-roots users of the technology, is another sign that speech technology has hit mainstream. The growing crowd who refer to voicebots today are treating telephone systems as functionally equivalent to related automatons from games and the web. The OED defines "bot" thus:
"...2. Computing. An automated program on a network (esp. the Internet), often having features that mimic human reasoning and decision-making; spec. (a) a program designed to respond or behave like a human (in games, chat rooms, etc.); (b) a program that locates information."
and the users of "voicebot" make perfect sense.
And I think "voicebot" will take off. It beats "IVR system" and its cohorts hands down on syllables (2 vs 3+), transparency (it's not a TLA nor a collection of vague nouns) and relevance (it does what it says on the tin). On the other hand, "bot" is often used negatively for poor attempts at HCI, and it's hard to see that "voicebot" won't fall into that trap, especially given the number of high profile systems out there that seem to have been designed without the user in mind.
Even so, I'll take it for now. It means I'll now be able to give the complete elevator pitch on what I do before the doors even close...
