Voice Messaging User Interface

Voice mail is certainly one of the most common interactive voice response (IVR) applications in telephony. When we talk of designing these systems to be easy to use, there is much overlap with general IVR system design, but there are also significant special characteristics to voice mail systems. This chapter discusses designing voice mail systems for usability, with particular emphasis on the special characteristics, demands, conventions, and standards associated with voice mail. In addition to coverage of the ubiquitous touch-tone user interfaces, this chapter also discusses the state of the art in voice mail user interfaces: novel prompt and menu structures, the use of automatic speech recognition, unified messaging (“universal mailbox”), and multimedia mail.

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