Five9 (News - Alert) officials have announced an IVR with Speech Recognition product, billing it as one with tools for better service and support.

Company officials say it can be used for IVR self-service apps to provide touch-tone or speech input, depending on preference or the circumstances of the call: “Using advanced speech recognition technology, the Five9 IVR will analyze spoken input and provide an appropriate response, including confirmations and error prompts for cases when the speech recognition engine cannot effectively hear the caller's input.”

This means the IVR can provide self-service options for bill payment, store and branch locations, debt collections and accounts payable, appointment reminders, order status, reservations, and more, company officials say, since that’s the kind of stuff you want to push off on IVR, leaving your agents to handle the questions that require actual thought and human intelligence.

Five9 officials say they’re committed to avoiding unplanned disruptions in service as well, and s have architected their platform for fault tolerance, using redundant phone carriers, Internet connections, hardware components, and software servers.

In fact, if architecture redundancy is a particular concern of yours, Five9 offers an option for Geographic Redundancy that will automatically back up the system and provide failover services within minutes of a disruption.

And if it’s reports you want, well, you’ve come to the right place. The Five9 Virtual Call Center can give over 100 standard reports with call center metrics on ACD Queues, Agents, Calls, Campaigns, IVR Scripts, pretty much anything you’d need. They can be viewed within the web-based application or exported into a spreadsheet application for more detailed analysis as well.

Earlier this year TMC’s (News - Alert) Deepika Mala wrote that Five9’s Virtual Call Center Release 8 won the 2010 INTERNET TELEPHONY Product of the Year Award.

Virtual Call Center delivers call center capabilities, can be rapidly deployed, and has lowered costs for over a thousand inbound and outbound call centers around the globe. Over one billion telephone calls per year, for tens of thousands of agents worldwide are processed by Five9 software.

Speech Recognition to the Five9 Self-Service IVR, which may be ordered from Five9 as a standalone product or in combination with either the Five9 Inbound Call Center or Blended Call Center, is added by Five9 Virtual Call Center Release 8. Over 100 additional new features are provided in the release, including an option for geographic redundancy, a new library of over 100 standard call center reports, expanded Cloud APIs and more.