Conversational IVR is a phone menu that understands a caller's whole spoken sentence, so the caller says what they want instead of pressing 1 or 2. IVR stands for interactive voice response, the recorded menu that answers a company's phone number. A conversational IVR is also called a speech IVR or a natural-language IVR. It is often built into a conversational AI platform.
An ordinary IVR works only with key presses. "Press 1 for sales. Press 2 for service." A caller who wants something that is not on the menu must listen to several menus, guess, and often press 0 for an agent. Large companies end up with menus four or five levels deep, and callers dislike them.
A conversational IVR asks one open question instead: "Please tell me why you are calling." It then does three things. It converts the caller's words into text, through speech recognition. It works out the reason for the call, which the industry calls the intent, and picks out details such as a date, a city or a vehicle number. Then it acts. It may send the call to the right team, or finish a simple task itself.
Here is a typical case. A car owner in Jaipur calls the service helpline of a car maker. The IVR asks why he is calling. He says, in Hindi, "My car's AC is not cooling. I want to bring it in on Saturday." The IVR recognises two things: the intent is a service booking, and the day is Saturday. It finds his car from his registered phone number. It checks the slots at his nearest service centre and offers 10 a.m. or 2 p.m. He says "ten". The IVR books the slot and sends a confirmation by SMS. The call takes under two minutes and has no menu at all. If he had said something it could not handle, such as a complaint about an earlier repair, it would have sent him to an agent in the contact centre, with the reason already on the agent's screen.
Indian callers make this harder in two ways. Many switch between languages in one sentence, for example Hindi with English words. And phone audio is often poor, with traffic noise or a weak signal. So the speech models must be trained on real Indian phone calls.
How is a conversational IVR different from a voice bot? The IVR's main job is to understand the reason for the call and send it to the right place, finishing only short tasks. A voice bot holds a longer conversation and tries to solve the whole problem itself. Many companies now replace the IVR with a voice bot.