I was asked yesterday who we were aiming SoftIVR at. It's a simple enough question, but there's a fairly complex answer. I've reproduced it below.
I started building IVRs in the 1990s, and then it was easy: telcos, call centres and small collection of specialist service providers. What I can see happening is a democratisation of the market, driven by two things: a reduction in the financial costs of entry which has already happened (get old PC from shed, install Asterisk or FreeSWITCH, job done) and the lowering of technical barriers to entry, which is what we're trying to achieve. The Asterisk and FreeSWITCH users' mailing lists are full of questions from new users who are having trouble getting started, and these are from people who have a Linux box and have managed to install a package on it, so they're not complete numpties when it comes to dealing with technology, but there's too many bits of configuration which they need to get right and things which they need to understand before they can make progress. So what we're trying to do is to get people straight in at a level where they can write a simple service and try it out, hence some of our choices - Javascript vs. VoiceXML being a prime example - and then progress to more complex services without having to relean what they already know.
That democratisation ought to lead to an explosion of service offerings, of which many are likely to be me-too, possibly with a twist: web-enabled conference calling with the ability to break the group up in to smaller groups for discussion for remote learning applications being one we recently came across. IVR is a part of that sort of application, and what we'd like to be is one of the providers of IVR services of choice for developers of such applications.
I started building IVRs in the 1990s, and then it was easy: telcos, call centres and small collection of specialist service providers. What I can see happening is a democratisation of the market, driven by two things: a reduction in the financial costs of entry which has already happened (get old PC from shed, install Asterisk or FreeSWITCH, job done) and the lowering of technical barriers to entry, which is what we're trying to achieve. The Asterisk and FreeSWITCH users' mailing lists are full of questions from new users who are having trouble getting started, and these are from people who have a Linux box and have managed to install a package on it, so they're not complete numpties when it comes to dealing with technology, but there's too many bits of configuration which they need to get right and things which they need to understand before they can make progress. So what we're trying to do is to get people straight in at a level where they can write a simple service and try it out, hence some of our choices - Javascript vs. VoiceXML being a prime example - and then progress to more complex services without having to relean what they already know.
That democratisation ought to lead to an explosion of service offerings, of which many are likely to be me-too, possibly with a twist: web-enabled conference calling with the ability to break the group up in to smaller groups for discussion for remote learning applications being one we recently came across. IVR is a part of that sort of application, and what we'd like to be is one of the providers of IVR services of choice for developers of such applications.
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