Interactive voice response system with partial human monitoring

Abstract

The present invention enables service agents in a call center to monitor portions of calls that are especially error-prone (e.g., automated speech recognition of an address, etc.), while portions of calls that are not error-prone occur without any human monitoring. An interactive voice response (IVR) system script (e.g., a VXML script, etc.) is divided into a plurality of independent dialog sequences, each of which is assigned a human-monitoring requirement that indicates whether (and optionally, to what degree) the dialog sequence requires monitoring by a service agent. In the first illustrative embodiment, a partial ordering enables some dialog sequences to appear in a different order in that of the IVR script when it is advantageous to do so. In the second illustrative embodiment, each dialog sequence that requires human monitoring is recorded and packaged into an agent-review task that is subsequently sent to an available service agent for review.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.