Editing Interactive voice response (section)

== History ==
Despite the increase in IVR technology during the 1970s, the technology was considered complex and expensive for automating tasks in call centers.<ref>{{Cite news|title=History of a business revolution at the end of a phone|publisher=Scotland On Sunday|author=Harrington, Anthony}}</ref> Early voice response systems were [[digital signal processing]] (DSP) technology based and limited to small vocabularies. In the early 1980s, Leon Ferber's Perception Technology became the first mainstream market competitor, after hard drive technology (read/write random-access to digitized voice data) had reached a cost-effective price point.{{citation needed|date=February 2013}} At that time, a system could store digitized speech on disk, play the appropriate spoken message, and process the human's DTMF response.

As call centers began to migrate to multimedia in the late 1990s, companies started to invest in [[computer telephony integration]] (CTI) with IVR systems. IVR became vital for call centers deploying universal queuing and routing solutions and acted as an agent which collected customer data to enable intelligent routing decisions. With improvements in technology, systems could use speaker-independent voice recognition<ref>{{Cite web|title=Healthcare - VCloud IVR Solutions|url=https://vcloud.com/ivr-healthcare/|access-date=2021-04-29|website=vcloud.com|language=en-US}}</ref> of a limited vocabulary instead of requiring the person to use DTMF signaling.

Starting in the 2000s, voice response became more common and cheaper to deploy. This was due to increased [[Central processing unit|CPU]] power and the migration of speech applications from proprietary code to the [[VoiceXML|VXML]] standard.