MockTell: exploring challenges of user emulation in interactive voice response testing

Increasing use of telephone devices has made the Interactive Voice Response (IVR), a technology for accessing information over phone, popular among the commercial organizations. IVR systems are used for critical applications like flight reservation, tele-banking, etc. which requires to have well tested IVR systems. Manual testing of an IVR application requires dialing number, listening and responding to voice prompts through key-press or speech. Automating the tests for IVR applications requires mimicking the user behavior. We present MockTell, a generic tool for call emulation with ability to mimic user behavior. MockTell uses data generated from real world calls for call emulation that helps in optimizing and evaluating the performance of IVR applications. MockTell also allows simulation of calls to provide further testing of system.